Dief Will Be Chief Again

I once saw Diefenbaker in person at a Grey Cup game. In high school, I wrote an essay on him. Yet like everyone around me, I thought he was a joke as Canadian prime minister. A blowhard, and a sophist as a speaker.

Yet it seems to me now that Diefenbaker was right about most things. And he would be just what Canada needs right now. In his day, like Trump, he fought against the bureaucracy, what we now call the Deep State or the blob. “Everyone is against me but the people.” In the end, the Deep State, along with the “Laurentian elite,” managed to beat him. They labelled him a “Renegade in Power,” just as they have tried to do with Trump. At the time, I bought the con. He was before his time. Had he won through then, things might be much better now. 

He spoke for the West, for just one thing. Western alienation has only gotten much worse since, for being ignored. It now threatens to end the country. 

He fought for human rights—now being critically lost in Canada. His Canadian Bill of Rights was far superior to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that superseded and largely subverted it. He led the charge for human rights internationally too. 

And he led the charge for human equality and against multiculturalism. His great final battle cry was for “One Canada” and “no hyphenated Canadians.” We went down the opposite path, and it was the wrong path.

Many, of course, are angry at him for cancelling the Avro Arrow. I think this is mostly a matter of myth. I suspect his was the right decision, that this project was a pipe dream.

Most significantly, Dief was a true leader. He did not go with the polls nor the cocktail circuit commentariat. He had principles. And, like Trump, he had the tools to lead: he was a great rhetorician. He was always entertaining to listen to. He kept things interesting.

We need his like again.

Is a Golden Age Near?

 

It was not long ago I was lamenting the absence of leaders. We had them back in the 1980s: Thatcher, Reagan, JPII, Pierre Trudeau, Gorbachev, Mitterand, Steve Jobs. These were people of stature. But since the 80s, we seemed to have been led by midgets with no sense of direction. Worse, they seemed untrustworthy and often illegitimate. Sunak? Biden? Pope Francis? Justin Trudeau? Macron? Tim Cook? Never mind ideology; these were empty suits off the rack. It was as though our civilization had lost all energy.

Then came Trump 2.0. It is worth being grateful for the fact that we are again in a time of giants. Trump is revolutionizing American politics. Never mind ideology, again—this is true leadership. He does not follow polls or received wisdom or the system: he leads. His administration is composed of other original thinkers, charismatic and principled leaders: JD Vance, Marco Rubio, RFK Jr. Tom Holman, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Doug Burgum, Pete Hegseth. It is all quite exciting.

At the same time, in the private sector, we have seen the rise of Elon Musk. He too is an original thinker, like Steve Jobs but more so, accomplishing one impossible thing after another. His latest prediction is that the US will enter a period of double digit economic growth within the next year and a half. Holy cow.

I long lamented the loss of the old media—or rather, the credibility of the old media. Back in the eighties, The Economist was trustworthy—you could count on a reasoned take on the world. I used to trust CBC Radio. Both collapsed into kneejerk leftism decades ago. Yet now, we seem to have trustworthy voices emerging in new media. There is turmoil, but The Daily Wire seems to set a responsible standard for commentary. Joe Rogan seems intelligent and honest.

Are leaders emerging in other countries as well as the US? Farage looks promising in the UK—he is certainly a leader. Italy has Meloni, and Japan now has Takaichi. Those are three important countries. Local “Trumps” are winning elections in Latin America.

We may be on the verge of good times—times as good as or better than the eighties, when the East Bloc collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, the world was suddenly unipolar, the economy was expanding, and personal computers were suddenly appearing on desks everywhere.

Canadian Leaders and the Oncoming Election

 R

RB Bennett: the risks of winning the wrong election.

The talking heads at CBC’s At Issue think Pierre Poilievre, Yves-Francois Blanchet, and Jagmeet Singh all face likely loss of their party leadership after Monday’s election.

I believe only Singh is in trouble. Singh’s caucus will probably be cut in half; Singh will lose his own seat; and it will be his own fault—for backing the unpopular Liberals until they themselves pulled the plug. According to the polls, by stalling, he lost a chance for the NDP to form the Official Opposition. The latest polling has them down to eight seats, losing party status. He should have known, historically, that third parties are always punished for entering a coalition. And such a coalition, with an already unpopular prime minister! He really seems to have intentionally destroyed the NDP.

But Blanchet will surely not be blamed if the BQ loses seats. He is brilliant; the BQ cannot do better. It is circumstances--the tariff scare, and the fear of Canada breaking up--that have caused Quebec voters to rally, temporarily, around the Canadian flag and the obvious federalist alternative in Quebec, the Rouge. I expect BQ regulars to understand that, and see Blanchet as their best option going forward.

And about the same is true of Poilievre. He has run a flawless campaign; he is a brilliant rhetorician, a brilliant tactician. He was poised, six months ago, to crush the Liberals. That big win slipped away due to circumstances beyond his control: Trudeau’s resignation, Trump’s tariffs, Carney’s coronation and adoption of key elements of the Conservative platform. These show, if anything, just how effective a politician he has been. He forced his opponent to resign. He managed to kill the carbon tax, without even being in power. Nobody else in the Tory party is likely to do better. And, if in opposition, nobody else in the Tory party is likely to be a more effective opposition leader.

True, the Tories have dumped their last two leaders after only one election loss. But neither Scheer nor O’Toole had Poilievre’s legitimacy. 

Scheer’s leadership was tainted by scandal. First, he snuck past Bernier, the front runner in his leadership bid, by making a backroom deal with the dairy lobby. That left a lot of bad feeling in the party. Second, since he won in this way, he did not have a strong personal following; he was second choice for most who supported him. Third, he had falsified his job history and concealed his dual citizenship. Fourth, he lost his ideological cred by waffling on the abortion question. It is not that he was either pro or con: it was that he seemed to change his position for the sake of power. So he did not come across as a man of principle.

O’Toole ran for and won the leadership as a “True Blue” Tory; then campaigned in the election as “Liberal lite.” There is a saying in politics: if you abandon your principles for power, you’d better deliver power. Otherwise, you’ll have no nothing to fall back on. Ask Tom Mulcair. 

But Poilievre, like Harper, has ideological cred to sustain him through a season of want. He inspires loyalty; he won the Tory leadership by a wide margin on the first ballot. 

I have no special insights, and therefore no ability to predict the outcome of the election. I can only look at the polls. As of this morning, 338 Canada predicts a Liberal majority government at 186 seats. With the NDP at just 8 seats.

But there is a trend towards the Conservatives in recent days. So I’m hoping for a Liberal minority. Then perhaps, we may get a chance to remove them in a year or two.

I expect the Liberals’ policy of fighting a trade war with the US will prove disastrous. Their “green” agenda will provoke a national unity crisis. Even without this, one pundit says whoever wins this current election is likely to rue the day, since bad times are coming, and they will be blamed. 

The Lord works in mysterious ways.

Let’s hope he still likes Canada, despite our arrogance.

A New Hope

 

Here’s a cheerful thought. Our current leaders seem to be the least competent and most corrupt in modern times. The elites seem to have gone mad. And yet—I have never been one to admire politicians. Those I genuinely admired in the past could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Bryce Mackasey, Eugene McCarthy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Men of genuine principle.

Yet there are suddenly a lot of public figures out there I genuinely admire, and would vote for with enthusiasm: Pierre Poilievre, J.D. Vance, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard.

I may be culturally prejudiced here. One thing I notice is that most of these figures are Irish and Catholic. All except Tulsi Gabbard.

Bad times throw up good leaders.

The Democrats' Box

 

John Fetterman, second from the right. Kamala Harris, third from the left.

The Democrats in the US are in a quandary. They fixed the nomination last time to give it to Joe Biden. This was already a desperate choice; they knew he was old and unsteady. An op ed at the time said “just stay alive until election day, Joe.” But Bernie Sanders was even older, and not even a Democrat: he was, officially, an Independent Socialist. He looked like he was about to take the nomination. Pete Buttigieg, the next possible option, was only the mayor of a small midwestern city. Michael Bloomberg, only recently a Republican, had fizzled with the voters, despite a huge cash outlay. And nobody else was in striking distance in the party’s primaries.

So the idea was to push Biden as at least a safe pair of hands, who would be a one-term president and then pass it off to the anointed. Kamala Harris was the one they really wanted, primarily on racial and gender grounds: a black woman. But she had fizzled in the campaign. Now they would have time to coach her and to build some buzz.

Three years later, things have not worked out for them. Harris has not jelled; she does not seem capable of it. Biden is obviously failing. 

Which puts them in a box. They can’t safely run Harris; and Biden is failing in the polls. Any other candidate amounts to a rejection of Harris, and charges of racism and sexism. Nor is there another plausible candidate of sufficient stature. People speak of Michelle Obama; but she has no real qualifications for the job, reputedly has no interest in it, and her popularity would probably nosedive as soon as she started taking positions on issues and being seen as a politician. 

The essential problem here is a lack of quality candidates on the left, both in 2020 and now. Two words: John Fetterman.

The Canadian Liberals face a similar problem. Justin Trudeau is now an albatross around their collective necks; but there is no plausible replacement waiting in the wings, as there always had been in the past: no Paul Martin, no Jean Chretien, no John Turner, not even a Michael Ignatieff. No figure of independent stature around whom there is some real buzz. Mark Carney, perhaps; but he seems a faceless bureaucrat. Trudeau himself, as leader, was something of a Hail Mary pass, obviously underqualified, and there is no one else behind him. 

Why there are no leaders available on the left?

Because they seem to suppress and force out those of any leadership potential: RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Jodi Wilson Raybould. In the wider culture, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Warren Kinsella, Stephen LeDrew. Which is to say, they cannot tolerate and force out anyone with principles and independent thoughts. This is what leadership is about, and what it requires.

This is the mark of a cult, which has some guilty secret to conceal. You cannot trust someone with principles who thinks independently; they are bound to see and mention it.

This is death to any human progress. It is death to any democracy.

Why do people still vote for the Democrats, or the Liberals, despite the lack of any real leadership?

Because they are complicit. The shared guilty secret turns them into NPCs, zombies. And they react violently to any independent thought.

The guilty secret: a foetus is a human life.

Envy

 

It is a curious fact, in need of explanation, that much of the world is currently cursed by awful leadership at once. Justin Trudeau, I would argue, is the worst prime minister Canada has ever had. Joe Biden is certainly in the running for worst US president. Francis is so historically awful as pope some Catholics wonder if he is a sign of the end times. Rishi Sunak in Britain is, at best, a technocratic cipher.

And why is it that, not so long ago, the US, Britain, and the Catholic church all had outstanding leaders at once: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II?

I am reminded of the adage, “hard times produce good men. Good man produce easy times. Easy times produce weak men, Weak men produce hard times.” This may be the cycle.

Reagan followed the appallingly pusillanimous Jimmy Carter and his time of “malaise.” Thatcher followed a period of labour chaos presided over by the forgettable Jim Callaghan. John Paul II followed the notoriously prevaricating Pope Paul VI, the “Hamlet pope,” who seemed not to know his own mind.

Conversely, Justin Trudeau came in following a period of tranquility and prosperity, thanks to the fiscal discipline of Stephen Harper and, to some extent, Paul Martin and Jean Chretien before him. Although Trump’s presidency was superficially chaotic, Joe Biden followed a period of unusual peace and prosperity under Obama and Trump. Francis was elected after JPII and the intellectually impressive Benedict XVI.

I think this tendency to elect medicrities can be put down to envy. In ordinary times, people do not want to vote for someone better than they are. They will actually prefer a mediocrity. They turn to impressive leaders only in an emergency.

This is especially a problem in the US Democratic party. The party starts out representing the bottom half of the US IQ range: there is truth to the old saying that anyone who is not a socialist in youth has no heart, but anyone who is not a conservative once they grow up has no brain. And it is positively founded on envy as its chief principle. So this coalition is going to want to elect people with a lower than average intelligence. This explains a lot.

Winston Churchill is the perfect example  of this envy principle. He had been in government for decades—but he was not popular with his colleagues. They preferred to give the premiership to Neville Chamberlain, a dull mediocrity, perfectly suited, as someone remarked, to be mayor of Birmingham. He blew with the wind.

Only once in the most desperate crisis, did his country turn to Churchill. As soon as the crisis passed, they turned away again, in favour of another cipher, Clement Atlee, “a modest man,” as Churchill described him, “with much to be modest about.”

The sin of envy is all-powerful; it holds us all back. it tears down statues of the great. It holds human civilization back in uncountable ways.

The Headless Horsemen of the Apocalypse

A remarkable aspect of the current uprising in Iran is that it has no leaders. It is entirely organic and spontaneous. Yet it continues, night after night.

Whether by coincidence or otherwise, the Free World is also without a leader, at a time of crisis. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the sort of thing that might easily spark World War III. World War I was set off by far less.

Yet Joe Biden is not up to the job. The next option for leader of the free world would normally be the UK Prime Minister; Boris Johnson was holding down the position for a little while. But Liz Truss is in crisis and not even effectively leading her own parliamentary caucus at this point.

Okay, so the German chancellor? Scholz is new on that job and heads a shaky three-party coalition. He can do nothing decisive. Besides, Germany is in an energy crisis.

We are pretty far down the power and influence totem pole once we must all defer to the President of France.

Yet things still seem to be working out well enough for the free world without a leader. The support for Ukraine seems solid, and effective, and they are getting what they need. I understand someone has even set up a crowdsourced fund to buy tanks for Ukraine.

The Freedom Convoy back in February was also a virtually leaderless movement. Much of it was spontaneous.

Moral: leaders are no longer so necessary. Improvements in communication technology let people handle problems on a distributed, decentralized basis. Welcome to the internet. Welcome to direct democracy.

This is exactly why the leaders have been acting wild and autocratic lately. They are hearing the footsteps behind them.

Uneasy Lies the Head

Philippine President Roderigo Duterte.

I think it is time to show some empathy for our leaders. They are human, after all.

Just imagine having to make the kind of decisions they must make in this pandemic. Choose lockdown, and you may wreck your economy, and lose your country’s position in the world. People may starve. You may cause a revolution. Choose to keep things open, and you may kill thousands, millions, of people. Nobody will be happy either way. And there is never enough information; there are no precedents.

Weeks ago, President Duterte of the Philippines, the notoriously tough guy, was already looking gaunt and tired. He was pleading with his own people for patience and understanding. A lockdown in the Philippines means people will quickly have no food. He has no money to give them, or to get masks, gowns, pills, or respirators. Even if a cure or a vaccine is found, he will have to wait in line until the rich countries have all the doses they need. There are no good options.

I think Donald Trump is cracking under the pressure. He has seemed superhuman in the past, able to stand his ground against all comers. But the stress has been showing recently. Hydrochloraquine has not been panning out; he had no doubt been hoping it would. Now he too has no good options. He was getting very aggressive towards the media at his daily pressers. They richly deserved it, but you got the feeling he was acting out some of his own stress. A few days ago, he lost concentration and said something offhand about injecting disinfectants. He was tired; who wouldn’t be tired? Now the press is trying to crucify him for it. All as he needs to make these terrifying decisions. And now they are blaming him for seeming to lack empathy. He seems to have lost his composure: he cut that press conference short, and now is saying he will hold them no longer. He excused his remark on disinfectants by claiming he was just being sarcastic towards the media. Not plausible; the villainy of the media has simply become an idee fixe for him.

I sense he has finally been pushed beyond the limits of human endurance. He needs sympathy, an outpouring of support, a rest, and the rest of us need to pray for him. If only for our own sake. The American media, of course, deserve condemnation. I hope he can hold himself together.

I find it hard to pity Justin Trudeau; he seems so insincere. And it is easier for him; as Canadian PM, all he needs to do is the usual: look at what the US is doing, and make the same announcement a few days later. But long before this started, he seemed to me a frightened little boy. “Frightened” may no longer be a strong enough word. I think he has detached himself, and is only reading things put in front of him.

Doug Ford, in his first press conference after the lockdown, seemed close to tears. Unlike Trump, he shows visible empathy. Like Trump, he also shows frustration: lashing out a few days ago at anti-lockdown protesters as “yahoos.” You can see he feels helpless.

But the leader I pity most is Kim Jong Un.

I have no insight into what is going on in North Korea. Multiple press reports say he is dead, or near death. But we know we cannot trust the media. The South Korean Government says they believe he is alive and well. But we know we cannot trust government intelligence.

My intuition is that Kim is still alive, but in grave condition, and not expected to recover. “Brain dead,” one of the rumours, may be right. My guess is that COVID-19 is probably there, as it is in every other country in the world, and the system has not been able to manage it. In early April, his guard detail were photographed wearing masks. If Kim caught it, he is fat, a smoker, with a heart condition.

The true situation has not been publicly announced, and the NK authorities are taking pains to go about their business as usual, because nobody else is yet in command; they need to settle that first. They do not want to send any signals that might give their people an idea that an uprising might succeed.

At this moment, then, Kim may be facing death. He is, in the end, a human being. He has committed unspeakable crimes, for a self-indulgent life. Now he must meet the reckoning. And it must be terrible.

The horror he is going through, and will go through, seems to me too awful to contemplate. The fact that he deserves it does not change that.

Queen Elizabeth I, it is said, died in terror, saying she would give her entire kingdom for just one more moment of life. And Elizabeth, although a far worse monarch than history remembers, was nevertheless not in Kim’ league.

He, more than anyone, is to be pitied.

On Real Leadership

I did not support Trump among his Republican challengers back in 2015-16. Had I been the Republican Party, I would have gone with Jeb Bush. The conventional choice. I privately endorsed Trump in the general, but through gritted teeth. Ironically, I feared that if Hillary were elected, we would all have to go through the turmoil of an impeachment investigation. Over her emails. Which also suggested, it seemed to me, background collusion with either Russia or China. Mere incompetence did not seem a sufficient explanation.

By now, like many others, I am inclined to think that Trump has been an unusually good president. Not just because of a prosperous economy. He knows how to make deals. And that turns out to be an extremely valuable asset in a president.

I did not support Ronald Reagan, either, back in his primary runs. In 1976, sticking with an incumbent president, Gerald Ford, seemed obviously the right path for the Republicans. Even though I would have voted, instead, for almost any Democrat. In the 1980 Republican primaries, I thought they should have gone with George (HW) Bush. In the general, I would have preferred Reagan to Carter, but again, by default.

It shows how wrong I can be.

But not just me. Reagan came to power only due to exceptional circumstances. Trump’s rise was also exceptional: he won the general by a hair, and defying all predictions. So was Lincoln’s—the presidency was his first significant public office. So was Churchill’s, pulled in from the wilderness in a general emergency. Even after he saved the world in the Second World War, people were reluctant to vote for him.

Why are we all like this? Why do we actually resist voting for the best leaders?

I am drawn to this reflection by the odd refusal by the Dems to give Tulsi Gabbard their attention and support. It seems bizarre and almost suicidal to go instead for obvious old hacks like Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.

It is, surely, a love of the familiar. The same instinct that brings us xenophobia. People move along in their accustomed mental ruts, and there is an instinctive fear of anything outside them: fear of the unknown.

The problem is that Gabbard, like Reagan or Churchill, does not simply parrot the expected line on the issues. Yet this is a necessary trait in a leader: that they think for themselves, and have core principles.

You see the same thing in the arts—perhaps in all human endeavor. People resist anything that is genuinely fresh and new. They do not want their accustomed ways disturbed. They want décor.

And I, it seems, on the evidence of Trump or Reagan, am as bad on this as everyone.

But then too, there is a reason for this. At least sometime this gut conservatism is wise; that is probably why we have it. It is a good survival mechanism to mistrust the unfamiliar.

Hitler, too, was a leader who came out of nowhere and who seemed to be saying something both new and principled. Or Mao. If some large, impressive, and previously unknown creature emerges from the nearby forest, it is wise to be cautious.

If we could figure out how to make the distinction, between the principled genius and the dangerous demagogue, it would be the key to a great improvement in the human condition.

I think there is a distinction. Leaders like Hitler or Mao looked as though they were acting on principle, but actually had no principles. They were driven only by power. They chose their new principles only strategically to appeal in a time of turmoil. William Manchester, who followed his rise closely, noticed that Hitler said something completely different to each audience--whatever he expected they most wanted to hear. This is why Nazi ideology has always been hard to pinpoint. Mao, similarly, was in no way consistent in terms of which faction he supported within the CCP.

So the best test is a moral test: if a candidate has visibly done something that seems to go against their own career interest, on what seems a matter of principle, they are probably the real deal.

Churchill is an obvious example of this, in his principled opposition to dealing with Hitler and the Nazis, in his warnings of impending war. I think Tulsi Gabbard is also in this category: she hurt her career as a rising Democrat star last cycle by dissenting from the efforts of the DNC to fix the primaries for Clinton. Trump perhaps qualifies with his attacks on the press and political correctness. They have turned out well for him, but is he so savvy as to have foreseen this, or was he just determined to do it anyway?

On this same test, I think Maxime Bernier is the real deal in the current Canadian election. He did not seem to be thinking strategically in coming out against supply management. It is supposed to be an unpopular stand in Quebec. He definitely seemed to buck his own best interests in terms of seeking power by splitting from the Conservatives a year ago. In the normal run of politics, we would have expected Scheer to lose the next election, resign, and then Bernier would be the front-runner to replace him. He gave that up, apparently on principle.

I wonder if they could still coax him back, if Scheer comes up short.

On this same test, the Liberals, if they lose their majority or worse, ought to turn to Jody Wilson-Raybould or Jane Philpott as new leader.