More than 200 years ago, Edmund Burke penned the definitive defence of tradition. In it, he denounced the revolution still burning in France and endorsed the monarchy at home.
In response, across the ocean, Thomas Paine delivered a famous rebuke: “He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.”
While the ideological lines in the sand have shifted radically over the centuries, Paine’s observation serves to perfectly describe recent attempts by left-wing commentators to try and make sense of the seismic political events of 2024. Most notably, Kamala Harris’s disastrous defeat and Justin Trudeau’s slow motion car wreck of ever-collapsing support.
The line Paine draws is between the superficial and the substantive. And it’s one that continues to elude many progressives today, as they stumble through campaigns and misdiagnose the roots of their political decline.
Take, for example, the convenient fiction that resurfaces in Canada’s progressive circles every few years: the notion that any shift toward the Conservative party and away from the “safe” shores of the Liberal party is the result of an imported American conspiracy.
It’s the familiar bogeyman of “dangerous U.S. political trends” seeping into Canada’s supposedly idyllic, progressive landscape. If it sounds unconvincing and lazy, that’s because it is.
The very latest buzzword many commentators have latched onto to explain away this shift is “rage.”
Attempting to make sense of the Democratic Party’s devastating loss in the 2024 U.S. presidential race, Rahm Emanuel — current Ambassador to Japan, former Obama chief of staff and a veteran Democratic operative — offered this analysis in a recent Washington Post op-ed:
“Campaigns of joy in an era of rage don’t win elections. When Donald Trump declared, ‘I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,’ he was channeling a nation’s fury. The online cheerleading for the killer of a health-care insurance CEO in New York City is just more evidence of this seething, populist anger.”
Critics of conservative electoral success use the term “rage” as if it was invented the moment Trump announced his candidacy back in 2016. That he installed into every working-class heart a sense of grievance and alienation that was previously unimaginable.
It’s a fundamentally spurious view. It’s also profoundly ahistorical.
The United States is a country forged in revolutionary rage and repeatedly fractured by it.
Rage is not new.
What is new — or at least more prevalent — is the left’s tendency to pretend that rage is either misplaced or misguided, as if that delegitimizes its presence. In progressive circles, this wilful ignorance is the real problem. And if the left, on both sides of the border, has any hope of regaining their footing in 2025 and beyond, it must stop focusing on the mere presence of rage and start addressing the deeper issues that created it.
Emanuel is right. The politics of joy, at least at the moment, is finished. Finished because it has been exposed as utterly out of step with the realities people are living with. Unless the problems of grocery prices, job insecurity, the collapse of manufacturing and economic inequality vanish overnight, this will continue to hold true.
For all of Donald Trump’s hyperbole and invented injustices, the wellspring of rage he’s tapped into is not.
And the very worst any politician can do going forward is to pretend it’s simply not there.
Let me put it this way. Sometimes, you walk into a room with the wrong speech.
It’s not that you misplaced your notes, it’s rather that your message does not align with what your eyes and ears tell you is happening in the room.
In other words, if you hear people are worried about skyrocketing prices, citing positive macroeconomic statistics from Bay Street won’t reassure them. If they’re upset that everyday items are locked behind glass at the pharmacy, rhyming off crime statistics to suggest “things aren’t so bad” will only alienate them further. And if they’re repeatedly telling you they no longer have faith in institutions, the answer can’t be to go to bat for those same institutions.
This isn’t to say that progressives should fold over on every issue that they’re losing to their conservative counterparts. But they have to start from the basic premise that if people are angry, they have every right to be. And to get to work in articulating a more compelling response to that anger.
For many progressives, that means ripping up the speech, listening committedly and starting from scratch based on what they hear people in the room are actually saying.
The world is not asking for speeches filled with hopeful platitudes; it’s demanding leaders who can diagnose the rot beneath the surface and offer real solutions to the frustrations fuelling people’s anger.
