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Canada's Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre speaks during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada September 25, 2024.
Conservative leader fights with broadcaster
While Trudeau was enjoying a New York broadcast, his opponent, Pierre Poilievre, was getting deeper into a fight with a Canadian broadcaster.
Poilievre’s Conservative Party announced Tuesday that it will no longer give interviews to reporters at CTV, the country’s top-rated private news channel. The Conservatives are furious about a Sunday report in which the network put together several clips of Poilievre speaking to present a misleading quote. The network apologized, but the apology did not go far enough for the Conservatives, since it presented it as an error, not an effort to deceive the public.
Poilievre’s disagreement with the broadcaster predates this incident. Last week, he celebrated the downgrading of the parent company’s credit rating. BCE, which owns CTV, is a landline and wireless phone company, and often the target of Canadians’ ire because of complaints about service.
Attacks like this on a big company, which employs 40,000, are unusual in Canadian politics and may be disquieting for BCE management, since Poilievre’s party may soon be in charge of its regulator. Poilievre often complains about Canadian media coverage of his party, alleging that outlets are tailoring their coverage because of subsidies from Trudeau’s government. He has often promised to defund public broadcaster CBC, but the new focus on Bell signals a wider and even more confrontational approach to media relations.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks during a Conservative general election campaign event, in London, on June 24, 2024.
Viewpoint: Expect more drubbings for incumbents in France and the UK
Upcoming elections in France and the UK appear likely to deliver historic defeats for both countries’ ruling parties in a challenging electoral cycle for incumbents around the world. The polling shows the centrist alliance led by French President Emmanuel Macron’s Rennaissance party trailing both the far-right National Rally and the left-wing New Popular Front ahead of the legislative elections on June 30 and July 7 – pointing to an extremely difficult government formation process.
Meanwhile, the UK’s ruling Conservative party's dire polling ahead of the July 4 elections has prompted speculation of an “extinction event” that renders it virtually irrelevant in the next parliament. These votes follow others in countries including South Africa and India where the incumbents performed worse than expected.
What’s going on here? Eurasia Group expert Lindsay Newman says it’s a “long-COVID story” of the pandemic’s economic aftershocks fueling a political backlash. We asked her to explain.
This year is shaping up to be a bad one for incumbents. What are the lessons from elections so far?
In a series of surprise electoral outcomes, the ruling parties in South Africa and India both lost their parliamentary majorities, while the government-backed candidate lost Senegal’s presidential election to a little-known opposition figure. The driving narrative in all three is the long-COVID story – more specifically, historically high inflation levels.
Mexico, where ruling party candidate Claudia Sheinbaum easily won the presidential election, is one country that bucked the trend. Sheinbaum benefited as the hand-picked successor of the popular President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has advanced an agenda focused on addressing economic headwinds through job creation and wage increases.
Can you explain the long Covid effect a little more?
Following the economic dislocations of the pandemic, inflation has been elevated and persistent around the world. We have higher-for-longer cost of living pressures and unemployment rates – factors that are shaping how voters think and particularly what they think about their governments. Pocketbook issues always tend to be salient during elections, and many peoples’ pocketbooks seem especially light in the aftermath of the pandemic.
So, do you think this trend will continue this year — for example, in the outcomes of the elections in France, the UK, and the US?
That’s what the polling is telling us. The electoral reckoning with post-pandemic conditions, including the inflation shock, is a global story. The outcomes thus far in 2024 suggest this will remain a difficult cycle for incumbents. We have to expect more of the same in these upcoming elections.
Interestingly, the political backlash seems to be coming even in relatively healthy economic environments, right?
There is nuance to what we are seeing. Voters are responding to how they feel about the economic environment they find themselves in, rather than the statistics or the nuts and bolts of the economic outlook. In the case of the US, for example, the country’s economic recovery has been one of the bright spots of the post-pandemic period, yet it’s not perceived that way domestically, and surveys show that inflation, the economy, and immigration are key concerns for voters going into the fall.
There was a similar dynamic at play in India, which has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, yet the felt experience of unemployment, rising prices, and inequities is likely behind the election results.
How worried are you about the potential for this backlash to destabilize political systems around the world? Where do we go from here?
Given the disruption and disorder we have seen over the last five to ten years, we have to expect more rather than less uncertainty ahead. This year’s voter backlash ties into another trendline I have been watching: a rising new radicalization of attitudes as well as actions. It has its roots in tectonic shifts in well-established public opinion, such as the 18.5-point average decline in support for Israel across dozens of countries registered by a January poll. Another driver is a broad political realignment away from the center and toward the poles.
The political consequences of these shifts are seen in the US in President Joe Biden’s outreach to younger and more progressive voting blocs and in Donald Trump’s appeals to his base. In Europe, nearly one-third of voters now opt for antiestablishment parties, either on the far right or far left, while in Latin America, antiestablishment candidates have secured a wave of victories in the post-pandemic period. We will get through the 2024 election cycle, but the risky times are likely to persist as these dynamics continue to ripple through the global system.
Edited by Jonathan House, senior editor at Eurasia Group.
Dem bias in Ottawa has Trudeau targeting Trump
The most intense debate in the Canadian House of Commons of late has been about a humdrum trade deal update between Canada and Ukraine. It is being disputed by the opposition Conservatives because it contains reference to a carbon tax.
Since Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has made “axing the tax” in Canada his number one priority, he has removed his party’s support from the deal, even though Ukraine has had a carbon tax since 2011.
But the governing Liberals say they detect an ulterior motive: the rise of right-wing, MAGA-style conservatism in Canada that has undermined the Conservative Party’s support for Ukraine.
Trudeau’s camp takes aim at MAGA bull's-eye
The Liberals ran an online ad on Monday, ahead of a Canada-Ukraine free trade deal vote in the House, that featured a photo of Justin Trudeau shaking hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky while claiming Poilievre’s party is “importing far-right, American-style politics and refusing to stand with our ally in their time of need.”
Conservatives say they support Ukraine and have just called on Ottawa to send surplus weapons – specifically 83,000 CRV7 rockets slated for disposal – to Kyiv. But the Liberals need to disrupt Poilievre’s momentum and seem convinced that comparing him to Donald Trump might do it.
After the former president won the New Hampshire primary in January, the Liberals made a direct comparison between the two men in an online ad, which said that Trump was one step closer to the White House and that Poilievre was ripping a page from his playbook. The ad noted that both men referenced “corrupt media,” their countries being “broken” and used the slogan “bring it home.”
Trump’s eye-for-an-eye approach
This is a dangerous game, given Trump is ahead in most polls and is an Old Testament-style politician, more inclined to take an eye for an eye than to turn the other cheek.
Why would Trudeau risk baiting the man who could be in the White House this time next year, where he would wield the power to enervate the Canadian economy?
The prime minister knows Trump takes note of every slight and pays everyone back with interest. After the G7 meeting in Charlevoix, Quebec, in 2018, Trudeau gave a closing press conference in which he said Canada would not be pushed around in trade negotiations by the US. According to Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, in his book “The Room Where It Happened,” the president raged against Trudeau, calling the prime minister a “behind your back guy” and ordering his aides to bad mouth Trudeau on the Sunday talk shows.
But Trudeau’s Liberals are trailing the Conservatives by up to 16 percentage points in every public opinion poll, and this tactic may work.
An Abacus data poll from Jan. 28 suggested there is some evidence to suggest that associating Poilievre and Trump correlates with voting intentions, with those who feel that the two men are different more likely to vote Conservative. Tying the two men together in a pejorative fashion is good for the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party, so the thinking seems to go.
That remains to be seen. Attacking a political rival is always a challenge when the target is held in more esteem than the source of the attack, which is the case here, according to another Abacus poll that found Poilievre much more liked than Trudeau.
Canada’s former man in Washington says to hold fire
The risk is amplified in that the Canadian public may well see through such a transparent tactic and decide that Trudeau is putting his party’s interests ahead of the country’s.
That was the warning issued at the weekend by David MacNaughton, whom Trudeau once appointed as Canada’s ambassador in Washington. He told the Toronto Star that Trudeau is taking a risk by taking indirect shots at Trump.
Doing so will make it harder to fight Trump’s promised 10% tariffs on US imports if he comes to power, he said.
“We used to be seen by the Americans as a trusted friend, ally, and partner, and right now, I don’t think that feeling is as strong as it used to be,” he said.
That MacNaughton has been forced to say this in public suggests he is being ignored in private.
Trudeau revives Team Canada
Trudeau has revived the Team Canada approach to relations with the US that served his government well during the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement that yielded the U.S.-Mexico-Canada deal in 2018.
The new effort will be led by Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s current ambassador in Washington, Francois-Philippe Champagne, the industry minister, and Mary Ng, the trade minister (notably not Mélanie Joly, the foreign minister, or Chrystia Freeland, the deputy prime minister who fell foul of Trump during the USMCA negotiations. “We don’t like their representative,” Trump said at the time).
Municipal mayors, provincial politicians, and business leaders will all be urged to reach out to their contacts to sell the message that the two economies are more integrated than ever. Trade statistics based on the first three years of the new USMCA show that total US trade with Canada and Mexico totaled $1.78 trillion in 2022, a 27% increase over 2019 levels.
When not criticizing “ideologically driven MAGA Conservatives” in Parliament, Trudeau has tried to sound civil.
But as professional diplomats who have worked with Republicans in the US point out, “no amount of Team Canada can overcome those ill-advised MAGA statements.”
Libs and GOP on different planets
Another problem is that the two are on different political planets.
The Liberal government is not keen on engaging with Republican politicians and officials, in part because of an aversion that dates back to the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the US Capitol.
The lack of readiness evokes memories of November 2016, when Trump was elected and the Canadian government was caught completely off-guard. The professional bureaucrats who are meant to advise governments had provided no contingency plan for a Trump administration and Trudeau had even invited the sitting Democratic vice president, Joe Biden, to Ottawa for a state dinner the following month. “They were so excited at the prospect of Hillary (Clinton), even better than Obama because she was a woman. They couldn’t wait for the transition,” said one person involved in the planning process. After Trump was elected, the Canadian government couldn’t even reach him to arrange a congratulatory call.
Louise Blais, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations, was consul general in the southeast US at the time – MAGA land – and had built up an array of contacts among Republicans that proved invaluable. Among other things, she secured a phone number for the president-elect.
As she wrote in the Globe and Mail last weekend, even the most conservative Republicans are friendly towards Canada, realizing the relationship is a net positive for them. But they value a rapport built up over the years, not arranged in a panic, and they cherish mutual respect.
Blais recalled how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told her in 2016 that Republicans were hearing what Canada was saying about then-candidate Trump. “Be careful because you are picking sides,” he said.
Trade deal no protection against Trump’s tariffs
The long-standing Democratic bias at the official level is a luxury Canada can ill afford. Ottawa has a free-trade agreement with the US, but if the new president wants to impose a double-digit tariff on everything that crosses into America, Canada would be dragged into an expensive, retaliatory trade war.
Veteran Conservative MP Randy Hoback wrote on his Substack that the Canada-U.S. relationship is too critical to be jeopardized by domestic political concerns. “Trudeau’s actions are hazardous to our economy and national security,” he said.
Trudeau’s current emissaries don’t speak the same language as Trump’s party. A real Team Canada needs to include some people, like Hoback, who can speak Republican.
Canadian Liberals cry “Trump”… at their peril
Less than a year out from the US presidential election, concerns about Donald Trump’s potential return to the White House now include warnings of a possible slip into dictatorship. Last weekend, in the Washington Post, Robert Kagan wrote of a “clear path to dictatorship in the United States,” one that is “getting shorter every day.” Liz Cheney, a former Republican member of Congress and potential 2024 third-party presidential contender, echoed the concern, warning that the country is “sleepwalking into dictatorship.”
Meanwhile, north of the border, a desperate Liberal Party and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, way down in the polls, are doing their best to paint their main rival, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre, as a MAGA North incarnation of Trump, with everything that implies. As Politico reports, Trump’s influence over Canadian politics is significant, a potential “wild card” for Trudeau and a force that will shape the country’s next election, which is due by the fall of 2025 – but could come sooner.
MAGA-fying Poilievre
The Liberals have been working to tie Poilievre to Trump for months. They tested online attack ads ahead of an anti-Poilievre campaign back in November, and Trudeau claimed Poilievre was following Trump’s lead in abandoning Ukraine.
The logic of a Trump-Poilievre connection is simple. Trump is viewed poorly in Canada. The Liberals are drawing on Poilievre’s conservatism and faux-populism to cast him as a norm-busting, phony anti-elite politician hellbent on waging culture wars, demeaning the press, and attacking the country’s core institutions, such as the Bank of Canada and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
So far, efforts to MAGA-fy Poilievre appear to be failing. The Conservatives are comfortably ahead in the polls by double digits, including two recent surveys – one by Abacus Data and one by Nanos Research – that found them ahead by nearly 20 points.
The Liberals are more than eight years into government and showing their age. And while they managed to come back from polling deficits ahead of the 2019 and 2021 elections – and retain government, despite winning fewer votes than the Conservatives – so far Poilievre has proven a stronger leader than either Andrew Scheer or Erin O’Toole, who led the Conservatives in the last two outings. Poilievre has better control over his caucus than his predecessors. His messaging and focus is on economic issues, particularly the housing crisis, and that resonates with Canadians.
Trump vs. Trudeau, Take Two
Americans worried about Trump 2.0 believe they are staring down a real threat to the republic. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote earlier this week, Trump’s “increasingly unapologetic anti-democratic rhetoric” seems likely to foreshadow a threat to the country’s constitution and its checks and balances. There are fears he will stack appointments with cronies and ignore limits on presidential powers while finding willing accomplices in Congress and state legislatures. Will the man who refused to accept the 2020 election outcome accept 2024’s results if he loses? And, if he wins, will he leave quietly in 2028?
If Trump wins, the US might not be the only country in trouble. Trudeau may face Trump’s wrath – especially after being used as a punching bag ahead of the Canadian election. In 2020, John Bolton detailed how much Trump dislikes Trudeau, an account that rings true in light of how rocky the relationship between the two leaders was. Those years included awkward bilateral meetings, summit showdowns, rebukes over policy decisions including Canadian military spending, and an acrimonious renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. There is little chance the relationship will improve if Trump wins in 2024, and voters are taking note.
An October poll by Abacus Data found that Canadians believe Poilievre would better manage Trump than Trudeau – 37% to 28%. The polling firm’s CEO David Colletto explained to the Toronto Star that a Trump win would not necessarily boost Trudeau’s reelection chances, as Liberals seem to believe. He noted that respondents see Poilievre and Trump as sharing certain conservative affinities and perspectives. In this way, at least, Poilievre’s alleged proximity to Trump for them is seen as a potential asset.
What’s next?
Americans must consider what a Trump 2024 win would mean. Graeme Thompson, senior analyst at Eurasia Group, warns that observers may be discounting the possibility of it hurting US democracy.
“I think people are underestimating – as they did in 2016 – the odds that Trump wins the next election and the potentially dire consequences for the US republic that could entail,” he says. “The campaign itself is going to be brutal, and there’s a good chance that the losing side rejects the outcome, regardless of who wins.”
Canada must also prepare for a Trump win, and the Liberals will be doing so while trying to use the former president and the MAGA crowd as an anti-Poilievre cudgel – a strategy that may not even work. While Thompson reminds us that Canada is great at managing its relationship with its southern neighbor, “it will need that skill more than ever if it faces a second Trump presidency.” Moreover, the governing party might wish to rethink its strategy.
“If the Liberals are still in power,” he says “they would be smart to de-personalize the relationship as much as possible – that’s to say, make it transactional and interest-based, especially given the bad vibes between Trump and Trudeau.”
Unless something changes, given the current polling data, the Liberals, despite their best efforts, might not be around long enough to take that advice.
Canada's Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre speaks in the House of Commons.
Poilievre is polling well despite crying "terror"
The political exchange was sparked when a 56-year-old New York man set out to attend a Kiss concert, but instead ended up driving his Bentley at high speed into a barrier at the border crossing, going airborne and exploding on impact, killing him and his wife.
Fox News was quick to report that it was believed to be a terrorist attack, and Republicans were quick to link it to Biden’s border policies. On Twitter, Ted Cruz called it a terrorist attack, as did GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who has called for a wall along the northern border.
In Canada’s House of Commons, before the facts were established, Poilievre asked about reports that the incident was linked to terrorism. After it became clear it had nothing to do with terrorists, the Liberals accused him of jumping to conclusions. When he was asked about it, Poilievre berated the reporter who posed the question, which commentators, including this writer, thought went too far. He also came under harsh criticism for voting against a Canada-Ukraine free trade deal and delivering a misleading explanation for the vote.
Both incidents gave Liberals the opportunity to attack him as dishonest, mean, and a Trumpy northerner, perhaps hoping for make a comeback in the polls. So far, that has not happened. The most recent poll from Nanos shows the Liberals so far behind that they are tied with the NDP, which could put pressure on the smaller party to force an early election. Seat projections show that the NDP would pick up seats if there was an election today, but that’s no guarantee since their voters might not like to see the NDP bring down Trudeau, opening a path to a Poilievre government.A proud conservative holds a sticker in Irvine, California.
Viewpoint: The era of limited government is over for conservatives
For decades, the coalition that made up American conservatism included the strong influence of limited-government libertarians who identified themselves as the “leave us alone coalition.” But amid the social and cultural clashes playing out in America in recent years, a new, more activist strain of conservatism is rethinking the political value of leaving key institutions alone: National Conservatism.
NatCons see an existential threat from the secular left, and they want to use the power of the state to put conservative values back in the center of public life.
These ideas were on full display during the National Conservative Conference in Miami, Florida, this week. For three days, hundreds of conservative activists, intellectuals, and aspiring politicos debated the future of America’s conservative movement at the third annual gathering of the National Conservative Conference.
So, who are NatCons and what do they want? The US conservative movement traces its roots back to British intellectuals like Edmund Burke who opposed the liberal theories of universal rights advanced by people like John Locke. It continues through to the conservatives who founded the National Review in the 1950s and who today love discussing these and other long-dead thinkers at institutions such as Hillsdale College and the Claremont Institute. In recent years, this intellectual lineage was at risk of being rendered irrelevant by the unexpected political success of former President Donald Trump, who tore the conservative movement apart … but also gave it its most significant policy achievements in a generation.
Like the crews that show up after hurricanes, national conservatives see their job as rebuilding and revitalizing the intellectual foundations of conservatism to keep the movement alive for a new generation. Think MAGA, but with a Ph.D.
Chief among their tasks is helping conservatives challenge what they see as the biggest threat since communism: the woke left. The conservatives gathered in Florida believe leftists dominate US institutions, from academia to big business, and have long tried to dismantle the old American order grounded in faith and family values – and to replace it with an egalitarian world order. This, conservatives fear, would destroy what makes America unique, and great. While Trump’s message of making America great again resonates with this audience, there was open skepticism this week about the former president’s return to public life. Jewish yarmulkes were a more common sight than red MAGA hats, reflecting a very different wing of the Republican Party than those flocking to Trump rallies.
What’s the difference between national conservatism and regular old conservatism? Old conservatism, from the Barry Goldwater political realignment of the 1970s through the second Bush administration, was a mix of anti-communist national security hawks, evangelical voters in the 1980s and 90s, and economic free marketers who pushed for deregulation, low taxes, and open borders to unlock innovation. They agreed on the need for a robust military and a limited government focused solely on helping liberty flourish.
NatCons reject this. For them, conservative libertarianism failed to give working-class voters a reason to support the right. Combined with the electoral success of Trump’s populist economics and the fact that many believe the American left is a greater threat than anything happening abroad (with the possible exception of China), NatCons reject the free-market ideology of your father’s conservativism and see a role for a more robust and muscular leader who uses power to correct America’s course. The movement is anti-China, anti-big tech, anti-bureaucrat, and pro-God.
This means a deep disdain for the US civil service, a constant source of derision. They want leaders to fight the deep state, confront the liberal media, go after leftist academics they say are destroying education, and punch back when big businesses reflexively adopt liberal causes while ignoring the priorities of tens of millions of America’s religious and cultural conservatives.
Republican politicians in Miami clearly sensed a moment of opportunity. “Without the Bible, there is no modernity. Without the Bible, there is no America,” Missouri Senator Josh Hawley told attendees. West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore, meanwhile, shared his journey from welder to combatant against monied capitalists on behalf of his coal-mining constituents.
Nobody embodies the movement more than Florida’s young Gov. Ron DeSantis, who got a standing ovation after an hour-long, policy-heavy speech touting his accomplishments in confronting the media and big tech and his unique approach to COVID – a not-so-subtle dig at Trump, who elevated the person who, for conservatives, became the face of a rotten administrative state: Anthony Fauci. DeSantis’s speech directly referenced the quote from Trump advisor Steve Bannon that a country is more than an economy. This idea has turned into a nationalist creed that the government must offer more to its people than cheap Chinese imports, low-wage retail jobs, and a debased national culture.
National conservatism is an admission from the right that limited government did not work. It did not prevent jobs from moving to Mexico or stop China from stealing US intellectual property. It did not protect the nuclear family or create more two-parent households. It has not improved public schools, they say, or stopped enormous sums from being wasted in futile wars.
This movement sees itself explicitly representing a faction in a factionalized society that needs to fight to keep what it has the way the left has been fighting to take it. This is not a new movement, but it is a different form of conservatism that shares only a religious identity with your father’s conservatism. NatCons believe they are the future of the American right, and they are preparing to push the GOP in their direction through a declaration of policy principles that span from the bland to the radical.
The most radical – and one that’s causing division – is over the role of religion in public life. Some want to target Supreme Court decisions from the 1940s that expanded what had been a much more limited concept of the separation of church and state than Americans broadly accept today. A nationalist America is one with a strong conservative identity, one that until recently was largely religious in character.
Something not addressed at NatCon, however, was the rising diversity of America since the 1950s. At the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, America was 90% white and 90% Christian. Today, whites make up a shrinking segment of the population, and Christians are rapidly becoming a religious minority – still dominating Jews, Muslims, or Hindus in number but nowhere near as dominant as they were even 40 years ago as church attendance has plummeted. The collapse of the national religious identity has given way to secular leftism. NatCons, in turn, want to roll back the clock on social change by allowing states to bring religion back into public schools.
So can national conservatism tolerate dissent? Can it live with secular, childless, elite-educated America? Or is this yet another faction in a rapidly factionalizing American that cannot tolerate living in the same country as its cultural and ideological foes? The movement to protect the dying cultural vestiges of pre-2000s America is about more than simply making space for the religious right; it’s about reversing the dominance of the secular left. It’s unclear whether there’s room to tolerate those they see as sneering elites in academia and woke corporations, and who, in a healthy democracy, occasionally win elections.
Conservatives have factionalized themselves for years between “neoconservatives,” “populist conservatives,” and “free market conservatives,” and the religious among them grew up quite comfortable in their own strong identities – be they Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish.
While these groups mixed comfortably in an air-conditioned ballroom in Miami, it is unclear how being positioned to fight an ideological war for the soul of a nation against the enemies within is compatible with America as a pluralistic liberal society that has thrived on mitigating differences through politics. If the US is to successfully transition from its roots as a male-dominant, white Christian nation to a multiethnic pluralistic society, the factions need to find a common language.
But a language of accommodation is lacking. Public opinion polling frequently finds that Americans on both the right and left see the country’s biggest problems differently. Apart from education and church attendance, geography is increasingly the most important marker of political affiliation as Americans are clustering in places that are more culturally homogenous.
Many fear that America will be lucky if politics remains the only place where these cultural differences are fought. Too many countries have already shown us what happens when ethnic and religious groups find themselves uncomfortable with their neighbors. Today’s fiery political rhetoric could become tomorrow’s firebombs unless ideologues on the left and right make space for one another.
Nothing in Miami suggested we are close to that point.
Jon Lieber is the lead US political analyst at Eurasia Group.
NatCon 2022: Conservatives rethink foundations of the American right
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, DC reports from the 2022 National Conservative Conference in Miami, Florida.
What is national conservatism?
I'm down here in Miami, Florida, attending the third annual National Conservative Conference where we're hearing from a large group of conservatives who want to rethink the foundations that have held together the American Right for the last 50 years. Part of this is in response to Donald Trump's surprising election in 2016 and his dismantling of the conservative coalition that had supported the Republican Party to that point. Another big theme that we're hearing about is a reaction to what folks here call the woke Left who, in their mind, have dominated educational, business, and cultural institutions for a very long time and have pushed out the traditional Christian conservative values that built this country.
Coming out of that, some of the conference organizers want to explicitly allow states to bring back religious education into schools in order to make the United States once again a more explicitly Christian nation. Other folks here put an emphasis on de-emphasizing the role of free market economics, in what used to be known as the conservative three-legged stool between cultural conservatives, national conservative hawks, and free market economics. They want to take economics out of this altogether and capitalize on the political gains that were made by President Donald Trump, pushing a much more economically populist type of political philosophy.
And then I think one of the final big themes that we're hearing about today is that the era of limited government is over in the US. For the folks that are gathered here today, they see a much more robust role for taking power in the US and then using that power to advance conservative causes. For example, by reforming the civil service —— one speaker talked about putting term limits in place, not only for elected officials, but also for federal bureaucrats —— so that you didn't have these group of empowered Americans who had these jobs for decades and decades and could push policies that the national conservative movement does not like.
The conference has gathered together a range of folks from political philosophers, religious leaders, several leading Republican politicians including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida Senator Rick Scott, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, along with a number of conservative intellectuals who are engaging in this robust debate around the future of what conservatism is in the US politics.
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The case against Trump's big lie
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take: Hi everybody, Ian Bremmer here. A Quick Take to start off your week, and I wanted to talk about the January 6th committee with its televised hearings starting last Thursday and proceeding throughout the week and showing just how incredibly divided and dysfunctional the American political system is.
It's very clear from the initial proceedings that former President Trump was indeed, is indeed responsible for pushing a lie around the big steal, the elections going against him, that he tried to use every lever of power available to him, legal and extralegal, in office to overturn. And when that did not happen, was central to the demonstrations that occurred on the 6th of January. And when they turned out to be violent and had the potential to be much more brutally dangerous to the Senate, to the House of Representatives, to Vice President Pence, rather than call for them to be over, he put fuel on the flames. So I think, from my perspective, it's very clear that Trump has accountability there.
It's also very clear to me that the impact of the January 6th committee politically in the United States will be next to zero, that the process is broken and is functionally partisan in a way that both of the impeachments of Trump, unprecedented two impeachments of President Trump, and of course, no convictions, have also become politically broken and polarized.
Now, when I say partisan, I want to be clear that there are liberals and conservatives, the entire political spectrum is represented in the committee. Liz Cheney is taking the lead in a lot of the public presentation, and she's a committed conservative who votes with the Republican Party, some 90% of the time. So, I mean, from a policy and an ideological perspective, you're covering the map, but of course that's not what drives partisanship in the United States today, it's more about orientation to President Trump, and this is a deeply partisan anti-Trump group. There is not an effort to defend Trump. There are no Republican participants that are trying to present a, "what he did wasn't that bad. It wasn't really about him. There were real things to worry about, to be concerned..." No, no, none of that is going forward, in part because it's a difficult argument to make, but in part, because the leadership of the Republican party sees that there is no political advantage to them and they care more about that than they do about the stability of American political institutions. And so that's what's really driving the outcome here.
And again, it's important for me, at least as someone who considers myself not to have much of an ideological lens. I mean, I'm sort of overall a centrist. I'm probably much more liberal on social issues. I'm more conservative on economic issues. But the specific issue matters. The American political spectrum is itself very narrow. I tend to have a more global perspective on some issues than a lot of people in the American political framework do. But most importantly, I mean, I think that my antipathy to Trump as a human being has nothing to do with him being a Republican. I mean, I was just as opposed to him as a human being when he was a Democrat. He doesn't have any ideological attachment to a political party. They're just vessels for him to exploit his narcissism. And he's now a Republican. He was a Democrat. He was equally unfit for political office with either affiliation, but this is a big problem for the United States, obviously. We are fortunate in that Trump's most important quality in the way he really differs from other political leaders is his incompetence.
Yes, he's authoritarian in the sense that he doesn't believe in democracy, but he didn't actually try to systematically undermine checks and balances that limited the president's power when he was president. I mean, remember he was president in the middle of a pandemic. Anyone that really was an authoritarian would use that to declare a state of emergency and try to gain an enormous amount of power as president. He wasn't interested in that. He didn't want to work. Instead he said, "No, it's all about the governors. It's all about the mayors. Those guys are in charge. I'm not in charge. I don't want to do that." And in fact, the one person that was most aligned towards building an authoritarian US and undermining checks and balances was his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who was the first senior official he fired when he became president. So it's obvious that his authoritarianism is kind of more of a flirtation than it is something that he's particularly committed to.
And his corruption is he wants to make a lot of money, but it wasn't structural or strategic corruption. It wasn't like let's use and exploit the position of the presidency to make hundreds of billions of dollars. It was more just continuing to find ways to skim a little here and skim a little there. The rules of taxation don't really apply to him, and "I just got a bunch of gifts from foreign governments and I'll keep them as opposed to giving them back even though that's the rule, because the rules don't apply to me. And Ivanka gets some licenses to sell shoes and purses in China, while she also has a political position in the White House, and I don't care if that's a conflict of interest. I'm just going to avoid and ignore it." I mean, yes, there's corruption, but this is not the kind of systemic and structural corruption that you see in a country like Russia or a country like China, or frankly, even many mid-level mid-tier emerging markets, Turkey, for example. No, this was small stuff.
No, the thing that Trump truly excelled at compared to any other former president is the level of incompetence. And that meant despite the fact that he was president and desperately wanted to continue to be president, he had very little willingness to build a strategy to align people around him that could support and implement that strategy to structurally undermine the institutions of the United States. And that ultimately is one of the reasons why January 6th, as ugly as it was, was not particularly effective and was more of a clown show than it was a real threat to the integrity of US elections going forward.
Now, I still believe that this is a huge problem for the US politically because the country is so divided. The fact that you have the Democrats and a couple of Republicans who can't stand Trump, working as hard as they can to make this the cause for the 2024 election, and meanwhile, Fox News doesn't even cover it. And Tucker Carlson doesn't run commercials because he doesn't want people channel surfing and flipping over. Meanwhile, the average American only cares if their priors were already committed to the cause of anti-Trump. Inflation matters a lot more to most Americans than the result of the January 6th committee.
And I've seen this, I've gotten so many comments from intelligent viewers and listeners of my show and of my posts on social media saying, "Why should I care about this spectacle in Congress, as opposed to the gas price, which I feel every day, which costs me out of my paycheck? And this notion of democracy, and the US doesn't have political leaders that I trust and they're all out for themselves anyway. They're just going to screw me. And if the US doesn't stand for anything but its rich and powerful people, why should I pay attention to yet more of that show?" And the very fact that President Biden today is that lower approval levels than President Trump was at this point in his presidency is a very, very stark reminder of just how dysfunctional, divided and broken the American representative political system today is.
Now there's upside, and the upside is that through all of this, I don't see Fox actively trying to defend Trump. They're just not focusing on the issue at all. And I do believe that there is a growing likelihood that both Biden and Trump face significant primary challenges in the 2024 election. And ultimately, that perhaps is the biggest silver lining because that would be profoundly good for the United States, frankly, to get rid of a Biden that would be 86 by the end of his second term if he were to run again and win, and Trump who is obviously unfit for the presidency of the United States.
I mean, if there were successful Democratic and Republican primary challenges to both of them, we would be in a much better position as a country. But for right now where we are left is a January 6th committee that obviously reflects accountability and responsibility for crimes in office of President Trump that will once again be ignored because the political system is being driven only by what's in the interest of one party versus the other party. And at the same time, we have, whether it's the Supreme Court that's behind, it feels like it's a fortress right now behind all of these fences, whether my friend, Chris Coons, who says that we're facing a season of political violence. The Southern Poverty Law Center that just came out with a nationwide survey that has almost a majority, some 35, 40% of Americans, slightly more Republicans, slightly less Democrats, but unprecedentedly high for both saying that they would support revolutionary movements even if they call for political violence if they align with their interests.
This is a very dangerous time for the Americans not to care about rule of law, not to care about fundamental precepts of what makes legitimate political institutions, to tune that out and say, "No, that's not what I'm going to spend my time focusing on." In part because we've let these institutions erode for 30, 40 years now, and it hasn't affected the average Americans very much, but of course that's true until it isn't anymore. So, I mean, I've been spending a lot more time focusing on Russia/Ukraine, because it has massive impact on the global economy and because it's a war in Europe, and because it's also a topic I know very well. But on the back of the January 6th committee and everything we've seen the last week and also being in DC a bit last week, I thought I'd spent a little bit of time talking about that with you today.
I hope everyone's well, I'll talk to you soon.
For more of Ian Bremmer's weekly analyses, subscribe to his GZERO World newsletter at ianbremmer.bulletin.com- What We're Watching: Jan 6. hearings begin, Beijing's Zero bet ... ›
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