Rage politics meets its serious counterpart

Serious times call for serious politics. That means serious leaders offering serious solutions.

If all this sounds like a campaign slogan for the establishment, you’re probably right. But its rising resonance may well prove the unravelling of the conservative populist rage that has been driving politics in Canada, the United States and Europe.

Already we are seeing signs that the “burn it all down” rhetoric of more than a decade of MAGA Trump in the United States, Brexit and Faragism in the United Kingdom, and the angry and anti-establishment brand of Poilievre conservatism in Canada, has crested. Today, voters are yearning for stability and real solutions, the exact opposite of what divisive populist politics promise.

Events, current and past, rightly fuelled the anger. The 2008 financial crisis marked the beginning of our current “end times.” It was followed in short order by the first triumph of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement in 2016, Brexit in Britain in 2016, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas atrocities in Israel and that country’s two-year invasion and war in Gaza, and the triumphant return of Trump and MAGA in 2024. Now comes the ongoing war with Iran launched by the U.S. and Israel.

Individually and in combination, these events roiled economies and society. Public institutions in Canada, Britain and America all managed ably enough through the crises but had insufficient imagination and ambition to anticipate and address the ensuing economic and social fallout. Public trust in government plummeted despite record levels of public spending. From homes to groceries to wages, nothing seemed affordable or attainable.

If there ever was a time for populist gains, this was it. And gain they did. Until they stopped. Brexit would not win in a U.K. referendum today. Trump is deeply unpopular with everyone but his MAGA base. His Republican party will struggle to win Congress in the November mid-term elections. Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives lost a sure-thing election and are further from, not closer to power than in the past decade.

Bad governing by flawed leaders is to blame. Trump’s government has bungled file after file, from DOGE cuts by Elon Musk to ICE raids by Kristi Noem to tariff hikes by Howard Lutnick. Each initiative was either bungled or reversed in some fashion after their high-profile and ill-conceived launches.

In Britain, revolving door prime ministers killed the brand of its most successful political party, the Conservatives. The current Labour government is showing the door to its first prime minister in 15 years, not halfway through its majority mandate.

Meanwhile, the poll-leading, populist upstart Reform UK party is imploding as its leader, Brexit-architect Nigel Farage, has resigned his seat in Parliament over allegations of concealing millions of dollars in personal donations. He plans to re-contest it as a classic two-fingers “up yours” to “the British establishment” to rekindle the rage flame of populism that is his brand. We’ll see.

Truth be told, populist leaders and movements just aren’t made for the serious work of governing. Today, competence and results are in vogue. Mark Carney gets it, has it, and is winning as a result. Even if that means upending every past Liberal policy of his predecessor or ditching his own strong personal values and views about climate change.

The lessons for Canada’s populist conservatives are dispiriting. Pierre Poilievre has a serious mien and takes himself very seriously. Mark Carney is a serious prime minister who does not. The image contrast is vivid.

More troubling for Poilievre is that he has allowed himself to become defined and, hence, trapped by the angry populist politics of the conservative movement.

Movements are not the same as parties. Yet, by running for leader the same month as the trucker convoy came to Ottawa, he symbolically and practically fused the two. Deviation from the movement’s harder ideological and angry edge, necessary to win votes beyond the base, risks his leadership.

Truth be told, Poilievre is more comfortable in the persona he has crafted. He must be, for he has rebuffed every attempt to soften his style or amend his message to broaden his appeal. His labelling of Ontario conservative critics last week during a high-profile Calgary Stampede event as “Liberal lobbyists from out east” is a case in point.

This Conservative leader is the genuine “movement conservative” article. Angry, populist and anti-establishment. He revels in rebellion, even to his own. His trouble is that the prevailing political zeitgeist in politics has changed.

The riptide of rage has ebbed. Being the tribune of the “outs” is satisfying, even important, but will keep him and his party on the outside looking in at someone else’s government.

Mark Carney recognized we are living in different times. He changed with it. Pierre Poilievre hasn’t. He had hoped to surf a wave of grievance and anger at Justin Trudeau’s government into the Prime Minister’s Office.

He would do well to take the advice of Bob Dylan, who wrote and sang:

“And you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’”

» David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.