When Barack Obama first won the presidency in 2008, he ushered in a distinctive left-liberal aesthetic of personal power. Young, handsome, eloquent, and black, Obama was cool, and in his coolness, he managed to appeal to constituencies whose express priorities are often at odds: the young, progressive professional managerial class (PMC), as well as older centrist boomers. When you voted for Obama, you weren’t doing so because of enthusiasm for the Democratic party or because of his policy platform. The person was the message.
Every major Western leftist movement has tried to replicate Obama’s progressive charismatic authority, his leftist Caesarism. The world is now littered with politicians and former politicians who are Obama knockoffs: Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Pedro Sánchez, Sanna Marin, and so on. They all fit a similar mold. They are polished, progressive, and good-looking. They stand above and sometimes disdain the apparatus of their own political party, so much so that they are accused of centralizing power, surrounding themselves with flatterers, and acting like autocrats. They know how to speak with confidence and eloquence, even as they deliver ambiguous, noncommittal prose. This presentation is intentional. And nobody tried harder to master it than Justin Trudeau. Trudeau is the archetypal embodiment of this model, both in its initial appeal and in its deep weaknesses.
Going into his first general election in 2015, Trudeau had clear advantages. With his last name, he was the closest thing Canada has to domestic royalty. His good looks and acting skills set him apart from his incumbent opponent, Stephen Harper, who was deliberately boring and staid in his personal presentation. Trudeau offered Canadians the opportunity to elect their own quasi-Obama: a progressive Prince Charming who would project Canadian multicultural values around the globe. With populism ascendent in the United States, Trudeau gave the Canadian managerial classes an unmissable opportunity to signal their moral and intellectual superiority over the unwashed masses to the south. Trudeau scored the most points with his base in those early “sock diplomacy” days. Wearing turbans abroad and rainbow flags at home, Trudeau styled himself as the anti-Trump, and liberals in Canada and the U.S. ate it up. His popularity among American progressives excited his supporters in Canada. Like Obama, and much to the dismay of social conservatives, Trudeau showed that the right had decisively lost the culture wars of the late twentieth century. He was zealously pro-LGBT and pro-abortion, and he launched a national experiment in assisted suicide that morphed into state-counselled euthanasia. Voters didn’t care enough about these to eject their national leader: The moral majority was gone. Over the past decade, conventional conservative parties have struggled to respond to figures like Trudeau, because he showed the fading significance of the older conservative fusionism. In response, Canada’s Conservative party leadership tried and failed to banish social conservatives from their ranks, tacking left yet still losing.
Leftist Caesarism succeeded in showing the irrelevance of 1980s conservatism. Yet it was hoisted on its own internal contradictions. For one, this model isn’t really Caesarism at all. After Obama, leftists correctly discerned that twenty-first-century voters weren’t very interested in parliamentary norms and conventions, and wanted an authority figure to cut through all that. Yet the post-Obama Caesarist model presides over the abolition of personal power. The image that the PMCs and boomers want from a leader isn’t that of a decision-maker, but a charismatic celebrity who can read out a script. For the PMCs, what matters is that the script caters to luxury beliefs; for the boomers, what matters is that the script sounds nice. The model of leadership Obama set in motion, then, is really pseudo-Caesarism. It succeeds when the state apparatus that exists behind it runs smoothly, when the arc of history bends toward government largesse and bureaucratic efficiency. The leader is a figurehead who charmingly gestures toward that administrative system and reassures the public that everything is working fine (provided the unsophisticates who want to tamper with expertise are kept out of power). PMCs can go back to their striving; boomers can reap the wealth of their properties and collect their pensions.
However, despite Canada’s reputation as a well-run welfare state, the country was malfunctioning. Like many progressives, Trudeau talked big about technology, launching urban innovation superclusters to put his country at the center of the digital revolution. But they never delivered. Much to the embarrassment of its eastern-based elites, Canada is really a petrostate. Trudeau’s PMC-inspired zeal for green energy fantasies paralyzed Canada’s one reliable source of innovation and growth—its oil and gas sector out in the west. Runaway spending could hide some of these failures; Trudeau never abided by his 2015 promise to keep annual deficits under $10 billion. But by the time the 2019 election rolled around, Trudeau was presiding over scandal, a weak economy, and angry working-class voters. He had consolidated regional opposition in western Canada against him. By leaning into Canada’s particular brand of anti-American nationalism—Trump was in office after all—he won a minority government. It was another sign of the strength and vulnerability of the post-Obama brand of leftist pseudo-Caesarism. Beholden to the United States, a leftist leader can score victories by scolding the rightist swings of American politics. Obama did as much. Yet this strategy can’t last forever.
When the 2020 pandemic struck, Trudeau’s aesthetic got a second wind. As elsewhere, the laptop classes wanted nothing more from their national leader than a spokesman reading a script, which told them that the experts are in charge and safety comes first. Trudeau excelled at that. The pandemic also reassured Canadians in their basic prejudice: Throughout 2020 and 2021, Trudeau’s position was bolstered by Canadian contempt for the rebellious, anti-mandate elements in the United States. As vaccine and lockdown skepticism intensified throughout the U.S., Trudeau capitalized on his personal popularity and anti-Americanism to call an early election in autumn 2021, hoping to return his party to majority status.
But he overplayed his hand. While PMC urban enclaves returned the Liberal party to power, voters concerned about the stagnant economy spurned him: Trudeau only got another minority government. Trudeau’s image was permanently tarnished, even before the February 2022 trucker convoy, which revealed to the world the mean-spirited side of Canadians who wanted to use the power of the state to crush peaceful protests. Trudeau gave off the impression that scolding the unvaccinated was more important than addressing the concerns of working-class voters. He even failed to address the concerns of the managerial classes that were otherwise inclined to support him, as they grew more concerned about the diminishing prospects of middle-class life in Canada. And this is the core weakness of the progressive pseudo-Caesarism. In Obama’s case, progressives could hide the erosion of their base by guilting the lukewarm to support the left through the language of historical and systemic racism. Since Trudeau couldn’t pretend to be African-American like Obama did, he tried instead to stoke white liberal guilt by doing penance for a fictional genocide. These rituals energized true believers but turned off others.
In the Marxist paradigm, the ruling-class ideology distracts from economic exploitation. If this critique works in any Western country, it’s in Canada. In the Trudeau era, the ideology of white guilt distracted from rising cost of living, a dysfunctional government, and failing public and health services. The Canadian government’s multicultural ideology also didn’t fool the unprecedented number of immigrants Trudeau was letting in. Forty percent of recent immigrants to Canada say that if given the choice, they would leave (20 percent say they would go to the United States instead). Much to the dismay of progressives, immigrants find Canada unwelcoming and unaffordable. Under Trudeau, the country’s floundering working and middle classes, its eroding white majority, and the massive influx of immigrants could all agree on one thing: Canada is a scam.
Like other progressive pseudo-Caesarists, Trudeau proved to be spectacularly inept on his movement’s own terms. He could not deliver technological and economic progress. That failure gave the lie to the movement’s underlying pretension. Despite his best efforts, Trudeau could no longer convince many that his country offered a superior alternative to life in the United States. This explains why Trump’s Twitter trolling of Trudeau as the governor of the fifty-first state has been so effective. By exposing Canada’s acute dependency on the United States, as well as Trudeau’s own impotency to negotiate a good economic deal, Trump humiliated the prime minister. It provoked the final crisis within the Liberal party that forced Trudeau to resign. For a leader who relied so much on personal image, the greatest humiliation of all is Trudeau’s pitiful ratings. He resigns with the historically low rating of 16 percent, which would lead the Liberal party to its worst ever election performance. That’s the trouble with depending on aesthetics. Eventually, fashions change.
Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics.
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Image by Materialscientist, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
