Dispatch from the Front Lines: It was a great party, Canada. But it's over now
Now it's time to deal with the hangover ... and settle our tab.
Hello, friends. Lots to talk about this weekend. Let’s roll.
First, please enjoy the latest episode of The Line Podcast. We’ve gotten some very interesting and diverse responses to it. Check it out and let us know what you think. And for all those who’ve listened, thanks for letting us get it all off our chests. Truly. Having an audience as wonderful as you guys makes a lot of things easier these days. That’s not something we take for granted.
As always, the audio version of the podcast (along with a bunch of ways to subscribe to it) can be found here. Please help us out, as always, by liking, subscribing, leaving reviews, etc. And! Tell your friends about us! Word of mouth is a huge part of our growth strategy.
And now, on with the dispatch.
In our first reaction after the election earlier this week, we promised our readers that we were going to take a few days to reflect and process, and then come up with our big, sweeping conclusions. We regret to confess we may have led you guys on a bit. We’re not really sure we’ve drawn any massive conclusions yet. As we noted on the podcast, trying to articulate what all this means feels a little bit like trying to sketch an object that is so massive you can only see pieces of it at a time. We are all prisoners of our own field of view. We are sure that there are dimensions of this that are only going to become clear to us through the passage of time — either because they’re thrust in our face, or simply because we look at some new angle of it for the first time.
That being said, there are a few thoughts we’ve come up with. Contrary to some quick political prognostication that we saw flying around after it became clear that Donald Trump had been re-elected, we don’t think that this is going to be a good thing for our Liberal government in Ottawa. We’ve explained why we think that’s true politically already, so we’ll simply note today that what we said on Wednesday — that Trump will serve to make Pierre Poilievre look more normal, and that an already exhausted federal government will now be even further taxed by the demands of dealing with him — is still true.
But having thought about the matter further, we find ourselves even a little bit more pessimistic on this front than we usually are, and we concede that that is saying a lot. We’ve spent a little bit of the last few days chatting with friends and sources on both sides of the border. Everyone seems to be going through a similar process to our own. But one theme that did come up over and over again is how much is going to have to change in reaction to this.
Line editor Gurney will reluctantly resist the urge to inflict his “your expectations are a problem” article on you again, but that is essentially the crux of the matter. It wasn’t clear to us before this week whether Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was a fluke — a passing populist tantrum to get some genuine frustration and anger out of the system before returning to a more normal track of American history, as personified by outgoing president Joe Biden. The election of one of those two men was the anomaly — and there wasn’t any way to know which one it was in advance.
That’s settled now. Trump is no fluke, but the manifestation of a structural realignment of American politics and, because of it, the global order.