Media Failure And The Politics Of Desperation

On Poilievre's Winning Coalition

Was Pierre always going to win?

With the Conservative leadership election mercifully, finally fucking ending this weekend – and I do stand by the “fucking finally” part of this, get your shit together and never let a campaign be this long again – it’s fair to ask whether or not this outcome has been predetermined from the second this race started.

I argue that he was always going to win, but that’s also my selfishness, in that I wrote a column in February calling him the next failed Conservative leader, a piece that is half-correct at this point. I thought he was the obvious winner and now he’s winning, so in some ways, he was always going to win. That said, that’s an argument with an obvious fallacy attached to it – just because a sports team was favoured to win and does win doesn’t mean they couldn’t have been underdogs at one point.

That said, I don’t really think there was ever a chance for Charest or Brown to win, and while I thought Lewis would do better than she looks to be doing, I never thought she had a real lane to 50%+1. My Brown skepticism looks to have been vindicated even before he was tossed from the race – his grandiose claims about his membership seem like bullshit at this point, and his fundraising data was dogshit – while Charest has been exactly what I expected the whole time – old, stale, out of touch, and serving only to make a bunch of pundits look out of touch.

Let’s be very clear about something – if you thought Jean Charest ever had a chance to win this leadership race, you were wrong and you shouldn’t pretend otherwise. When I was wrong about Ontario, I owned it – I misread that race. But I highly doubt the media who propped up Charest for months will do the same.

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Here is, in plain English, why so many commentators peddled straight up lies about Jean Charest’s ability to win a Conservative leadership race: the conservatives they know and are friends with like Charest and they don’t like Skippy.

You know the thing about Laurentian Elites? We like other Laurentian Elites, and most people who work for big media companies in this country went to like 6 universities, but much more importantly, all share a commonality – they all have a common understanding of what politics is. They think politics is a thing that can be put aside, that our fundamental commonalities matter more than political persuasion, and that respect and decency towards those who disagree is of a high priority.

You wanna know a secret to life on Parliament Hill? Plenty of Liberal staffers prefer going out socially with Conservative staffers to New Democrats, because New Democrats are pious and annoying, whereas Conservatives don’t spend the whole night arguing about tax rates, they just drink a ton. When the politics stops in elite circles, everything’s just fine – hell, it’s why Jenni Byrne is such good friends with the Podcast Host Who Shall Not Be Named, because when Herle was done approving an ad that accused Stephen Harper of a fascist state, him and Byrne could get hammered and shittalk everyone together.

The conservatives that Laurentian Elites in the Windsor to Quebec City know are almost all pro-gay marriage, they’re pro-choice, they’re pro-immigration, anti-convoy, and they were all in the first rush of people to get vaccinated (and then, when the time came, to get their kids vaccinated) against COVID. I know many of those conservatives, and I even like those conservatives (sometimes). But they aren’t anything close to a majority in the Conservative Party or in the conservative movement, and yet the media class have their heads so far up their own asses that they couldn’t see it. And frankly, they couldn’t see it because they didn’t want to see it.

Why did PJ Fournier think that that dumbass National Post columnist could give Poilievre a run for his money? Because all of the conservatives in his elitist bubble speak like she does. The problem is, that’s not reflective of the sum of fuck and all, and somehow who works in probabilities and representative samples should probably know that. But again, for the elites, it’s all vibes and bubbles.

Go back and read what I wrote about the Convoy the night before the first full day of it, and you’ll see a complex and nuanced look at it, because I don’t hold these people in contempt, and I have thought a lot about the intersection of politics, culture, COVID, and disaffection. More bluntly, I am one of the rare people who hates those people’s politics and views without hating them, mostly because the Convoy and the anti-COVID politics more broadly was an understandable reaction to a general loss of control.

The rise in, for lack of a better word, militant conservatism is the understandable reaction to a situation where a group of people have been accustomed to the world working in a specific way over the years and are finding out that the world they knew no longer exists. The cultural norms of the 50s, 60s, and 70s are now fully gone, and the stories that the older generation told themselves – about a woman’s role in the world, about homosexuality and homosexuals, about abortion, about race, about all of it – aren’t true anymore. There’s a lack of deference from gays and women now – an expression of self not concerned with how other people would perceive us.

Be it gay people who aren’t cowed by their love but embracing it in public in ways that straight people have for millennia to women who do not care to defer to men or to seek their permission to do what they want how they want it, there has been a paradigm shift in my 25 years on this earth. And the voters who are moving to the right do not like that fact. They liked the old status quo and feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have been aggrieved by the changes of the last 25 years.

Seriously, put aside whether they’re right or wrong to feel the way I do, but just think about the anger of the modern, militant right, and you see the desperation of people who feel something slipping away. It is neither surprising or new that people are willing to do, say, and try extremely wild and crazy shit when they feel they have no better option. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” isn’t just an amazing song lyric, but a statement of the bloody obvious.

Given that, Charest’s campaign never gave anything to these people, because when they feel failed by the technocratic elite, their preferred choice is not to continue governance by technocrat – especially not when that technocrat is Quebecois and the average Conservative member hates Quebec more than I love This Charming Man. But more than that, Poilievre’s campaign is speaking to a group of people who, again, whether you agree or not, think that their voices have been ignored so that the elites can give fringe groups special treatment.

Given all of this, Poilievre’s victory was always obvious, but what’s even more interesting about this is the fact that the media never spent any time trying to understand Poilievre’s voters. Nothing I’ve said here is meant derogatorily – I’m talking, in a broader sense, about my own family, in addition to the broader movement. This movement is not just fascists and Nazis, even if some truly deranged people do exist in these spaces, but it is just average, normal people who feel desperate enough to give Poilievre and his style of politics a try.

Every time the Liberals do things like, to take but the last example, announce an action plan at Ottawa Pride for the community, it fuels a little more resentment that “those people” are getting preferential treatment from the elites, or the gatekeepers, and it makes a certain kind of culturally conservative Canadian question their priorities. Why did Scott Simms lose? Probably in part because his voters saw a Liberal government that was focused on issues that don’t matter to them. It’s not complicated.

What also isn’t complicated is what this means for the press, who have utterly failed to think for even two seconds about a large group of Canadians, and whose reporting of them makes little sense when they do. In resorting to caricature, they deprive the rest of the country of a full and complicated understanding of people whose actions have shaped a lot of this year’s political events. The press have had nothing else to do all year other than this Conservative leadership election, and they have categorically failed to understand modern Conservatism. And so, even Brian Lilley was printing bullshit about how three campaigns saw paths to victory and how Skippy needs 45% of the first preference votes or he’ll lose (ignoring that he’ll get Baber and Lewis preferences and benefit from Brown and Charest voters not ranking both of them) after Canada Day, at which point it was obvious Skippy was on cruise control.

The media have failed us here, because they have either lied to us about how close this campaign was, or they were too stupid to realize what was bloody obvious to anyone who looked at this. It’s been a disasterclass, a Guardiola-in-a-Champions League-Final level disaster even, that has harmed the reputation of an institution that is already on life support.

To the Canadian media: Get your shit together, and fast – it’s truly pathetic how badly you covered this campaign, and how easily you allowed yourselves to be conduits for lies.

Or else we’re all fucked.