Latest news with #ZackBeauchamp
Vox
30-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Vox Announces Media Partnership With the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism for the Second Annual 'Liberalism for the 21st Century' Conference
Today, Vox announced a media partnership with the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism (ISMA) for the second annual conference, 'Liberalism for the 21st Century.' This two-day event brings together some of the world's leading liberal thinkers, journalists, and advocates for a day and a half of programming dedicated to countering the rise of illiberalism and charting a course forward for a liberalism that can answer the challenges of the modern era. The conference will take place August 14 and 15 at the historic Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC. Vox is sponsoring the panel 'Philosophical Roots of Illiberal Movements,' moderated by senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp, dissecting the diverse intellectual origins of contemporary illiberalism, and exploring ways in which liberalism can respond at the level of ideas. The panel will feature Damon Linker, senior lecturer, University of Pennsylvania; Tom Palmer, senior fellow, Cato Institute; and Laura Field, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. 'Vox is proud to partner again with the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism in support of this important forum for dialogue in defense of democracy around the globe,' said Elbert Ventura, Vox's executive editor. 'We are at a dangerous moment, with the forces of authoritarianism gathering strength and threatening liberal democracy in the United States and elsewhere,' noted ISMA President and editor of The UnPopulist, Shikha Dalmia. 'These forces are aided by illiberal ideologies that deserve a forceful intellectual response. Ultimately, this is a battle of ideas, and we are very glad to have a partner like Vox with us.'
Vox
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
How America forgot the best way to defend its democracy
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. Americans aren't used to having to defend democracy. It's just been a given for so long. After all, it's the country's 249th birthday. But now, with experts warning that US democracy may break down in the next three years, many people feel worried about it — and passionate about protecting it. But how do you defend something when you don't quite remember the justifications for it? Many intellectuals on both the left and right have spent the past decade attacking America's liberal democracy — a political system that holds meaningfully free, fair, multiparty elections, and gives citizens plenty of civil liberties and equality before the law. Future Perfect Explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. On the left, thinkers have criticized liberalism's economic vision for its emphasis on individual freedom, which they argued feeds exploitation and inequality. On the right, thinkers have taken issue with liberalism's focus on secularism and individual rights, which they said wrecks traditional values and social cohesion. The common thread is the belief that liberalism's core premise — the government's main job is to defend the freedom of the individual to choose their path in life — is wrong. These arguments gained mainstream success for a time, as Vox's Zack Beauchamp has documented. That's in part because, well, liberalism does have its problems. At a time of rising inequality and rampant social disconnection, it shouldn't be surprising when some people complain that liberalism is so busy protecting the freedom of the individual that it neglects to tackle collective problems. But awareness of these problems shouldn't mean that we give up on liberal democracy. In fact, there are very compelling reasons to want to uphold this political system. Because Americans have gotten used to taking it for granted, many have forgotten how to make the intellectual case for it. It's time to remember. Liberal democracy does have a good defense. It's called value pluralism. When you think of liberalism, you might think of philosophers like John Locke, John Stuart Mill, or John Rawls. But, believe it or not, some people not named John also had very important ideas. Prime examples include the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin and Harvard political theorist Judith Shklar, who are strangely underappreciated given their contributions to liberal thought in the Cold War period. Associated thinkers like Bernard Williams and Charles Taylor are also worth noting. Let's focus on Berlin, though, since he was one of the clearest and greatest defenders of liberal democracy. Born to a Jewish family in the Russian Empire, he experienced the political extremes of the 20th century — the Russian Revolution, the rise of Soviet communism, the Holocaust — and came away with a horror for totalitarian thinking. In all these cases, he argued, the underlying culprit was 'monism': the idea that we can arrive at the true answers to humanity's central problems and harmoniously combine them into one utopian, perfect society. For example, in Stalin's communism, monism took the form of believing that the key is to establish a classless society — even if millions of people had to be killed to achieve that vision. If it were possible to have a perfect society, any method of bringing it about would seem justified. Berlin writes: For if one really believes that such a solution is possible, then surely no cost would be too high to obtain it: to make mankind just and happy and creative and harmonious forever — what could be too high a price to pay for that? To make such an omelette, there is surely no limit to the number of eggs that should be broken — that was the faith of Lenin, of Trotsky, of Mao. But this utopian idea is a dangerous illusion. The problem with it, Berlin argued, is that human beings have lots of different values, and they're not all compatible with each other. In fact, they're inherently diverse and often in tension with each other. Take, for example, justice and mercy. Both of these are equally legitimate values. But rigorous justice won't always be compatible with mercy; the former would push a court to throw the book at someone for breaking a law, even if no one was harmed and it was a first offense, while the latter would urge for a more forgiving approach. Or take liberty and equality. Both beautiful values — 'but total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs,' Berlin writes, 'total liberty of the powerful, the gifted, is not compatible with the rights to a decent existence of the weak and the less gifted.' The state has to curtail the liberty of those who want to dominate if it cares about making room for equality or social welfare, for feeding the hungry and providing houses for the unhoused. Some ethical theories, like utilitarianism, try to dissolve these sorts of conflicts by suggesting that all the different values can be ranked on a single scale; in any given situation, one will produce more units of happiness or pleasure than the other. But Berlin argues that the values are actually incommensurable: attending a Buddhist meditation retreat and eating a slice of chocolate cake might both give you some sort of happiness, but you can't rank them on a single scale. They are extremely different types of happiness. What's more, some values can actually make us less happy — think of courage, say, and intellectual honesty or truth-seeking — but are valuable nonetheless. You can't boil all values down to one 'supervalue' and measure everything in terms of it. If human values are incommensurable and sometimes flat-out incompatible, that means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously. To put it more simply: We can't have everything. We'll always face trade-offs between different goods, and because we're forced to choose between them, there will always be some loss of value — some good thing left unchosen. Berlin says it's precisely because this is the human condition that we rightly place such a high premium on freedom. If no one can justifiably tell us that their way is the one right way to live — because, according to Berlin's value pluralism, there can be more than one right answer — then no government can claim to have uncontestable knowledge about the good and foist its vision on us. We should all have a share in making those decisions on the collective level — as we do in a liberal democracy. And on the individual level, we should each have the freedom to choose how we balance between values, how we live our own lives. When others come up with different answers, we should respect their competing perspectives. Value pluralism is not relativism 'I do not say, 'I like my coffee with milk and you like it without; I am in favor of kindness and you prefer concentration camps,'' Berlin memorably writes. Although he argues that there's a plurality of values, that doesn't mean any and every possible value is a legitimate human value. Legitimate values are things that humans have genuine reason to care about as ends in themselves, and that others can see the point in, even if they put less weight on a given value or dispute how it's being enacted in the world. Security, for example, is something we all have reason to care about, even though we differ on the lengths the government should go to in order to ensure security. By contrast, if someone said that cruelty is a core value, they'd be laughed out of the room. We can imagine a person valuing cruelty in specific contexts as a means to a greater end, but no human being (except maybe a sociopath) would argue that they value it as an end in itself. As Berlin writes: The number of human values, of values that I can pursue while maintaining my human semblance, my human character, is finite — let us say 74, or perhaps 122, or 26, but finite, whatever it may be. And the difference it makes is that if a man pursues one of these values, I, who do not, am able to understand why he pursues it or what it would be like, in his circumstances, for me to be induced to pursue it. Hence the possibility of human understanding. Contemporary psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have made a similar case. His research suggests that different people prioritize different moral values. Liberals are those who are especially attuned to the values of care and fairness. Conservatives are those who are also sensitive to the values of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. It's not like some of these values are 'bad' and some are 'good.' They're just different. And even a liberal who strongly disagrees with how a conservative is applying the value of sanctity (for example, as a way to argue that a fetus represents a life and that life is sacred, so abortion should be banned) can appreciate that sanctity is, itself, a fine value. Berlin anticipated this line of thinking. Although he acknowledges that some disagreements are so severe that people will feel compelled to go to war — he would go to war against Nazi Germany, for example — by and large, 'respect between systems of values which are not necessarily hostile to each other is possible,' he writes. Liberalism can't just be about warding off totalitarianism. Is there more to it? Berlin's analysis offers a highly effective vaccine against totalitarian thinking. That's a huge point in its favor — and defenders of liberal democracy would do well to resurface it. But there's more to a good society than just warding off totalitarianism — than, to put it in Berlin's own terms, guaranteeing 'negative freedoms' (freedom from things like oppression). We also care about 'positive freedoms' (freedom to enjoy all the good things in life). In recent years, critics have alleged that Berlin and other Cold War liberals neglected that part of the equation. It's fair to point out that American liberalism has done a poor job of ensuring things like equality and social connection. But Berlin's account of value pluralism never pretended to be laying out a timeless prescription for how to balance between different priorities. Just the opposite. He specified that priorities are never absolute. We exist on a seesaw, and as our society's concrete circumstances change — say, as capitalism goes into hyperdrive and billionaires amass more and more power — we'll need to repeatedly adjust our stance so we can maintain a decent balance between all the elements of a good life. And on the global scale, Berlin fully expects that different cultures will keep disagreeing with each other about how much weight to put on the different legitimate human values. He urges us to view each culture as infinitely precious in its uniqueness, and to see that there may be 'as many types of perfection as there are types of culture.' He offers us a positive vision that's about respecting, and maybe even delighting in, difference. Nowadays, a new generation of philosophers, including American thinkers influenced by Berlin like Ruth Chang and Elizabeth Anderson, is busy trying to work out the particulars of how to do that in modern society, tackling issues from ongoing racial segregation to rapid technological change. But this can't just be the work of philosophers. If America is going to remain a liberal democracy, everyday Americans need to remember the value of value pluralism.
Vox
07-05-2025
- Politics
- Vox
The warped reality of the elites shaping Trump's administration
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Conservatives frequently accuse liberals of being out of touch with Americans. It's an accusation that stings partly because there's truth behind it: Real evidence suggests that liberal institutions, the Democratic Party chief among them, inhabit a moral universe distinct from that of the median voter. Yet far less attention has been paid to the disconnect between the right's intellectual elite and the American public. Liberal intellectuals live in an unrepresentative world, but so too do the right's thinkers — causing them to develop an idea of America that is largely unmoored from the country most Americans experience. And in the Donald Trump era, this disconnect may be the more influential one. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. This right-wing elite bubble is perhaps most precisely described as two bubbles. The first bubble is created by the overwhelmingly left-liberal tilt of elite knowledge production industries — most notably journalism and academia, but, to a lesser extent, law and tech. Conservatives in these areas often feel outnumbered and even persecuted in their professional life, creating a sense that the left is far more socially powerful in America than it actually is. The second bubble is a reaction to the first bubble: the creation of internally homogenous spaces within these liberal fields. These are spaces where conservatives talk primarily with each other about liberals and the left, often exacerbating their shared sense of threat. Fox News and the Federalist Society are two of the most influential institutions of the second bubble: islands of right-wing thought in fields where liberals predominate. But they are hardly alone. A host of other spaces, ranging from formal institutions like the Heritage Foundation to some billionaire-created group chats, serve as venues for right-wing professionals to talk politics among themselves. There's nothing wrong with ideological movements hammering out ideas among themselves. However, there is always a danger in such spaces of groupthink and caricaturing one's opponents. Increasingly, both are happening inside the right's bubble — and warping its view of the country in the process. In the past few years, there has been a cottage industry of right-wing intellectuals arguing that American culture and society have become fundamentally hostile to people like them. In their view, the right's embrace of Trumpian authoritarianism is not an act of political aggression, but a defensive response against a near-omnipotent cultural left intent on wiping conservatives off the face of the earth. This is not, of course, America as it actually exists. Real America is a place where evangelical Christians are the largest religious group, the Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority, and Donald Trump won the presidency twice. Yet this caricature of the country has taken deep root among right-wing elites. It is a belief given life by the right's experiences inside left-wing professions, and then strengthened and radicalized in the spaces they've carved out as alternatives. In prior years, this right-doomerism may have seemed like a sideshow confined to a handful of intellectuals. But in the second Trump administration, its adherents are helping shape policy in a host of key sectors, ranging from immigration to education to science to foreign policy. The carnage in those areas is, in no small part, these right-wingers swinging axes that have been ground for decades. What the double bubble has wrought Generally speaking, most people who write about political ideas professionally are in one of two fields: journalism or academia. The data suggests that these fields really are dominated by liberals and the left. You're often equally likely to encounter a socialist as a conservative; in some academic fields, Marxists and critical theorists vastly outnumber people on the right. This can understandably make conservatives in these spaces feel uncomfortable, or even unwelcome. But some of them go much further than that: They argue the ideological culture of the university is in fact the ideological culture of America, and that conservatives writ large are in the same position as the academic minority. This move is central to the argument of Regime Change, Notre Dame political theorist Patrick Deneen's 2023 book. One of the foremost Trump-aligned intellectuals — JD Vance endorsed his book, and Pete Hegseth was a former Deneen student — he believes America is being corrupted by left-wing rot that begins in the university. 'Universities…are today in the forefront of advancing new principles of despotism,' he argues. 'These educational institutions help shape the worldviews and expectations of the managerial ruling class, who then deploy to a variety of settings where those lessons come to shape most of the main organizations that govern daily life.' This overheated rhetoric grew out of Deneen's own experience in the academic bubble. In 2004, Princeton denied him tenure — a decision that he has publicly blamed on anti-conservative discrimination. In 2012, he left Georgetown for Notre Dame on the grounds that the former had become so secular and liberal that he could not feel comfortable there. 'I have felt isolated and often lonely at the institution where I have devoted so many of my hours and my passion,' he wrote in a contemporary letter to his Georgetown students. One can sympathize with Deneen's feelings of alienation without accepting his caricature of America as a giant faculty lounge. Yet despite Regime Change's analytic flaws (you can read my review here), it found friendly reception among many like-minded thinkers on the right, including Michael Anton, a longtime fellow at the pro-Trump Claremont Institute who is currently serving as the State Department's director of policy planning. 'The main divide in conservative ranks today is between those who see clearly what the Left has done and those who deny it — and attack anyone to their right who notices. Say what you will about Patrick Deneen, he's on the right — in both senses of that term — side of this divide,' Anton wrote in the Claremont Review of Books. When Anton speaks of 'those who see clearly what the Left has done,' he is not speaking purely in abstract terms. There are discrete and concrete institutions and networks, including Claremont itself, where people who share this sense of being under cultural attack by the left-wing elite. These are places where fantastical pictures of America as a place in the grips of a liberal plot are not seen as caricatures, but bleakly accurate accounts of 21st-century life. In such spaces, it becomes normal to treat America as a place where right-wing Americans are not just outnumbered, but on the verge of extinction. In one infamous 2021 essay, Claremont fellow Glenn Ellmers writes that 'most people living in the United States today—certainly more than half—are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.' For this reason, he argues that 'the political practices, institutions, and even rhetoric governing the United States have become hostile' and that 'the mainline churches, universities, popular culture, and the corporate world are rotten to the core.' In reaction, he writes, conservatives must prepare for a 'counterrevolution,' possibly a violent one — writing that 'strong people are harder to kill, and more useful generally.' Ellmers's essay reflects a level of radicalism that permeates right-wing intellectual spaces. And now, such ideas are shaping policy. We know this, in part, because some denizens of the right's intellectual bubble are now in top positions. Vance is vice president. Hegseth, a longtime Fox News personality, is the secretary of defense. Anton occupies one of the top positions at State, where he serves with Darren Beattie, an aggrieved former Duke PhD who was pushed out of the first Trump White House for associating with white nationalists. But we also know it because of the policies being put in place. Hegseth, for example, has spent less time trying to fix American warfighting capabilities than waging culture war on alleged leftists at the Pentagon. Beattie is leading an internal inquiry into the political activities of State Department staff that one official there describes as a 'witch hunt.' Perhaps the clearest case is the preoccupation with destroying America's elite universities through federal funding cuts and revocation of tax-exempt status. The Trump approach here is widely credited to Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo, who has made the notion of an America poisoned by New Left radicals in the faculty lounge the central principle of his career as a writer and activist. 'The most sophisticated activists and intellectuals of the New Left initiated a new strategy, the 'long march through the institutions,' which brought their movement out of the streets and into the universities, schools, newsrooms, and bureaucracies,' he writes in his book America's Cultural Revolution. 'Over the subsequent decades, the cultural revolution that began in 1968 transformed, almost invisibly, into a structural revolution that changed everything.' At the end of the book, Rufo (like Ellmers) calls for a 'counterrevolution' against the left. The Trump administration's demolition derby shows us what this looks like in practice.
Vox
28-04-2025
- Politics
- Vox
Today's Canadian elections are most important in decades — thanks to Trump
Canada's Election Day is here. It's been a short, hectic campaign season, marked by startling reversals — most notably a massive decline in support for the current opposition Conservative Party — and ignited by the resignation of longtime Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The race has also been reshaped by the politics of the United States, namely the aggressively expansionist vision and chaotic economic policy of President Donald Trump. Results should be in shortly after polls close at 10 pm ET. According to the polls, Trudeau's Liberal Party is expected to come out on top, although it's difficult to say now by how much. To fully understand what led to this strange election, how the US shaped it, and what's next for Canada, I turned to Vox's Zack Beauchamp, our politics correspondent, who lives in Ontario. Here's what he had to say (our conversation has been edited for clarity and length): So Zack, could you give us a brief overview of the Canadian political scene? There are a number of different parties that compete in national elections, but there are really only two that have a chance at holding the premiership. One, there are the Liberals — who are the incumbent party, and as you might guess, are the central-left party — currently led by Mark Carney, who's a central banker by career. Carney took over after the longtime prime minister, Justin Trudeau, resigned amidst significant unpopularity. Two, there is the Conservative Party. Their name is self-explanatory, and they're led by Pierre Poilievre, who is a career politician — he's been in politics since he was in his early 20s. For a long time, Poilievre was leading the polls. He's fairly right-wing by Canadian standards. Monday's race is primarily between the two of them. There are also other parties that matter, chief of which is the New Democratic Party (NDP), the left-wing alternative to the Liberals. They are intermittently successful, but this year are doing very poorly. You also have two smaller parties, the Green Party and the People's Party, which is an attempt to build a European-style, far-right party in Canada that so far, hasn't been very successful. On the Right The ideas and trends driving the conservative movement, from senior correspondent Zack Beauchamp. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. There's a fourth party which matters regionally, but can affect national parties: the Bloc Québécois, which represents Quebec, which is the French speaking part of Canada. It has very distinct regional interests around French language, French identity, and French culture. They usually do very well in national elections within the province of Quebec, but don't really perform anywhere else. I love the clear branding on all the parties there, that's very helpful. What do our main duo, the Liberals and Conservatives, believe in? If you're in America trying to think through who the Liberals and Conservatives are, imagine a Republican Party prior to Trump, then shift that party a little bit to the left to accommodate for a more left-wing country — that's the Conservatives. For the Liberals, imagine a party that's not Bernie Sanders, but certainly on the left-wing side of where the Democratic Party is right now. That's not how I would normally explain them if I was talking to a Canadian, or the most accurate way to describe them; the US and Canada are different countries. But if you're looking for a frame of reference to try to latch onto, that will give you a rough, analogical grasp for what the two major parties are. I should also note that there are certain hot-button issues in the US — like abortion or national health care — that are not issues in the same way in Canada. 'That anti-establishment movement isn't new in Canada, and it's not exactly Trump inspired, but it is Trump-inflected, given how Trump has shaped the modern populist right.' There is no real effort by any major party to get rid of Canada's permissive abortion laws, nor is there any effort to get rid of Canada's national health insurance. Those are both overwhelmingly popular, and one of the common Liberal attacks on the Conservatives is that Conservatives might actually want to change those policies secretly, even though they won't admit it. It's referred to as 'reopening the abortion debate' here in Canada; Conservative leaders in the past have had to deny any interest in doing so. That should give you a sense of how the political mean is very, very different here than it is in the US. I know recent events have scrambled the election a bit, but before that happened, what were the key issues on people's minds? Key here is Poilievre, who isn't Trump, but is as close to a Trump figure as could succeed in the world of Canadian politics. He is aggressive. He's populist in his rhetoric. He embraces conspiracy theories. He attacks the media — one of his signature proposals is defunding the CBC, which is Canada's national broadcaster, at least defunding its English language services, because, again, you've got to play to the Québécois. In general, he's a pugnacious figure who embodies the anti-establishment strain of Canadian politics. That anti-establishment movement isn't new in Canada, and it's not exactly Trump inspired, but it is Trump-inflected, given how Trump has shaped the modern populist right. All that wasn't too much of a problem for Poilievre prior to Trump's reelection, even though Canadians didn't like Trump at that point either. Poilievre was cruising to an election victory — he had years of polling suggesting that he had an insurmountable lead against Justin Trudeau's Liberals. The reasons for that are straightforward: There are problems in Canada that are real, most notably cost of living is a significant concern for many people here. The cost of housing is sky high. It's very difficult for a lot of Canadians, especially for first time home buyers, to find an affordable place to live. Poilievre capitalized on this sense that things are just too expensive. He would say, 'Canada is broken,' on the campaign trail, and by that he meant primarily that the cost of living is too high, and that Liberal policies were making it too high. You can agree or disagree with the accusation about Liberal policies, but many Canadians, it seemed, were willing to vote for the Conservatives, because the Liberals have been in power for 10 years and there were still problems. Poilievre represented a change for a lot of Canadians, and that was what people wanted. That strategy was working right up until December. Did the Conservatives have specific policies to solve the cost of living crisis, or was their solution more, 'We're not the Liberals'? Poilievre had a housing plan that was by most standards — by which I mean, most YIMBY standards — pretty good. He really committed to relaxing regulations getting in the way of Canada homes, and to creating federal incentives to build more houses that could be offered at affordable rates. The Liberals have adopted similar ideas, and under Carney they have also put forward an aggressive YIMBY-inflected housing program. So it's not like the Conservatives had a monopoly on this idea, but they were able to very credibly make the argument that the Liberals have been in power for 10 years and they haven't done any of this stuff. So we had the Conservatives cruising for this great victory, Poilievre was so happy. Now the Liberals are expected to win. What happened? I've talked to a lot of different Canadians, and the overwhelming story from academic experts to ordinary people is that Trump changed everything. Related Canada is so furious at the US right now Now it wasn't just Trump. An important thing that happened is Trudeau's resignation in December. A lot of the Conservative campaign was about going after Trudeau personally and blaming Trudeau's policies for anything that was bad. When the Liberals brought in a new candidate who is stylistically different from Trudeau, that blunted some of those attacks. But it's very hard to say that the Liberals would have been able to win just by changing candidates — people were pretty unhappy with the Liberal brand in general, which is where Trump comes in. Trump started threatening to annex Canada, and started backing that rhetoric with coercive policies, like hitting Canada with tariffs for no discernible reason, and without any sensical guidance as to how Canada could reverse them. Trump accused Canada of sending fentanyl into the US, when really it largely flows the other way around. He started to talk about how it would look awesome on a map if the US was a giant country that had both the US and Canada as one territory. It started to hit Canadians that like they actually were dealing with the crazy person across the border who wanted to destroy their entire nation if he could. And that led to a transformation in the issue set that was dominating the Canadian election. It went from housing, cost of living, tired of the Liberals to We need to defend ourselves from Donald Trump. On that issue, the Liberals had the Conservatives dominated. And it's not even about policy — the parties agree that it's important to resist Trump's attacks, to use countertariffs as needed, to ease inter-province trade, and to work with European partners. It's about trust. Poilievre is in style and substance, is a Canadian Trump. He's been endorsed by Elon Musk publicly. He courted support among the American right. Nobody believes that he is deeply opposed to the MAGA project. That makes Poilievre a huge albatross on the party's neck. Carney, by contrast, is this boring central banker, who has happened to work through crises before: He was leading the Bank of England during Brexit, for example. Brexit didn't work out great, but that wasn't really Carney's fault. He emerged from that looking like a policy guy who did his best to try to manage an external economic shock that was imposed on him. And what is Canada in the middle of other than an economic crisis, imposed on it by an outside actor? That's allowed the Liberals to ask the very effective question: Who do you trust to get us out of this mess, a career politician from Ottawa or a guy who made his bones managing economic crises? I saw some headlines that suggested some of the polling was narrowing a little bit as we head into the Election Day. Is that notable? The polls are tightening in part because Trump has been preoccupied. He has been a little bit too busy with his global trade war to focus on his Canadian trade war. The less Trump threatening Canada is in the headlines, the less the Conservatives are getting hammered by their inability to have a good position. Of course, literally days before the election — last Thursday — Trump started the 51st state talk again. Carney confirmed that Trump talked about it in a direct meeting that the two of them had. And then Trump said in his Time interview last week, 'I'm really not trolling with talk of Canada as a 51st state.' It's like he's trying to make the Conservatives lose. Let's assume the Liberals win, as expected. I know what their margin of victory might be is hard to know right now — but if they do win, what does that mean for Canada's future? It depends on whether you trust what Carney is saying publicly, or what most people seem to think is likely to happen. Publicly, Carney is talking about a complete reevaluation of the relationship with the United States. He says that the era of Canada depending on the US is over, and that Canadians need to decouple from the US, and reevaluate their entire strategy for economic and national self-determination. 'Practically, Canada will need to try to maintain a good relationship with the US. It would take quite a lot to push Canada into a truly radical trajectory.' Decoupling from the US will be really hard. It might actually be impossible for Canada, for a variety of practical reasons. One is that Canada just does not currently have the military assets to do national self-defense without significant cooperation with the United States. And while there isn't a real invasion threat from anywhere, there are some defense interests, for example, up in the Arctic, where Canadian and Russian waters border each other. The US and Canada collaborate on air space defense; Canada depends a lot on — and has contributed to — NATO. Economically, there's something that economists call the 'gravity of trade,' where trade flows are pulled in by the geographic proximity of two places because there's all sorts of practical difficulties in trying to trade with places that are further away. Practically, Canada and the US are right next to each other and if they want to trade perishable things like milk, they don't have many options other than each other. My guess is the reality is going to be somewhere between business as usual and Carney's maximalist claims on the campaign trail. There will be a Canadian effort to build up various plan Bs in the event that the United States permanently becomes Trumpy. But practically, Canada will need to try to maintain a good relationship with the US. It would take quite a lot to push Canada into a truly radical trajectory where they feel like they have to balance against the United States rather than refining the nature of their relationship on the edges.
