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 antiestablishment 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.

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