Poilievre's Personality Problem

On Pierre's Carefully Constructed Contradiction

On the corner of Film Twitter I lurk on, there was an interesting clip going around on Monday. It was a clip of a Big Picture episode from December talking about The Brutalist, the plausible to likely Best Picture winner and the challenge of talking about this movie as a movie when so much of the discourse - from both critics and the Director himself - is about the movie as a metaphor. As it was phrased on the podcast, how much of the hype of the film was because of its subject matter and how much of it was about the fact that Brady Corbet had Final Cut of the movie and that the movie is about the artistic struggle to make pure art, which is reflected in a nearly four hour movie with an intermission built in that had a cult around its film canisters at festival season.

It’s a great clip, even if you don’t care about The Brutalist or anything to do with movies, because it’s about the difference between what is inherent in the art and what is manufactured around it - the narratives, the timing, the things that aren’t explicitly on the screen. It’s also weirdly fitting for this moment in our politics, and unlocked something I’ve been trying to figure out how to write for a while.

It’s always really funny when Pierre Poilievre gets the support of, or at least the acknowledgement from, the American right, for a simple reason - Poilievre is fundamentally everything they’ve hated in politicians and they love in Trump. Poilievre is a career politician essentially born in the swamp and raised by it, with no charisma or charm, a relatively nerdy physical appearance, and a hilarious habit of reminding people he held all (or at least lots) of his current views since he was a student, at which point we’re all reminded that he was the guy you all hated in high school.

In an era where politics is increasingly not about policy, but about giving off the right vibes and being comfortable going into certain spaces, Poilievre’s support from many of the so-called “Manosphere”, most notably Joe Rogan but including Elon, Jordan Peterson, and others, is both understandable and baffling. These are mostly right wing people on some level, though I think Rogan, Theo Von, and the comedian-turned-podcaster set in general are less so right wing than just anti-establishment and generally holding low social trust, so it makes sense Poilievre would appeal to them. But it’s also ludicrous that people that claim to value masculinity and virility are so willing to back a less charismatic and more dweebish Mitt Romney.

It’s especially funny because the Liberals are about to elect someone who actually gives us a fighting chance on the authenticity debate here, for a simple reason: Mark Carney is actually a regular, all Canadian man’s man, if we’re gonna talk in that kind of language. Played hockey growing up and even got a scholarship to Harvard because of it, Carney is at least in theory a better fit for that kind of casual, jocular masculinity the right seems obsessed with on a lot of levels. If you were to ask who between Poilievre and Carney have the better University stories, it’s the D1 athlete over the nerd any day and it’s not even close.

Carney’s people clearly understand the capacity to use his relationship with hockey to narrativize him to the Canadian people, but let’s have some real fun with it. Carney’s a better storyteller than we’ve realized, as his latest video proves. Put him in front of a camera and get him to tell some stories - his first Oilers game, the feeling the one time he stepped on the ice in a NCAA game, the best Bruins game he went to while in Cambridge, whatever - all the while reminding people that he’s actually done something objectively cool, and you can narrativize him.

The funny thing about Carney is that he actually was what most parents would dream of their kids doing - playing a sport well growing up, getting a scholarship based on it, getting a good degree and a well paying job after. It’s the platonic ideal, what every Beer League father wants their kid to be growing up once they reluctantly accept their kid won’t actually be the next Crosby or McDavid.

The thing about Poilievre is that he’s trying to be Doug Ford when he’s not. The Fords, for all of their many sins as both human beings and as politicians, were genuine human beings. When Rob Ford said he never ate a staff member out and that he said he has “more than enough to eat at home”, it was obviously a disgusting comment. It’s also the funniest thing a politician has ever said. If that happened now, he’d be a hero on the internet for it. And that sort of comment - that authenticity, because that is the most Rob Ford way to deny allegations of sexual harassment in the workplace ever - is why Ford remained ahead of Olivia Chow for second place until he had to drop out in September due to his cancer. But if Poilievre ever said that, or anything even a fraction as provocative as that, he’d sound like a fucking alien. And that’s kinda notable when you’re trying to mimic a Fordian appeal.

Poilievre’s great skill this Parliament has been to show just enough to various sides that he can be one of them. When he’s running ads on HGTV, it’s ads with his wife and kids as b-roll to show he’s a softer family man. When he’s talking to Jordan Peterson or that one crypto podcast he went on, it’s different. When he’s with Peterson, it’s “I believe the same things I did as a student”, but when he wanted to run for leader in 2020 his first move was running to La Presse to talk about how glad he is to be wrong about gay marriage and what a success it’s been. When he’s in Northern Ontario he’s a fighter for the working man, and yet he rails against a tax rise on the richest 1%. He’s trying to be everything to everybody, but the thing about trying to be everything to everybody is it comes at the cost of real authenticity.

The frightening reality for Conservatives is that the real Poilievre is probably not very personally compelling. He’s a nerd who went to UCalgary at the height of the Calgary School, the Tom Flanagan and friends movement that was the intellectual firepower behind the Reform Party and Ralph Klein. This is a man who seemingly by accident quasi-endorsed ending the Indian Act in the 2022 Conservative Leaders Debate, which was shocking except for the fact that Poilievre’s argument in that debate was essentially Flanaganism at its most distilled. He’s up late watching YouTube videos about crypto and was tagging his videos with an obscure incel acronym. And he’s supposed to be authentically cool?

I don’t know if Carney can pass for cool anymore - years of living in the absolute hell that is high level economics is enough to kill anybody’s cool. But I think Carney can be authentic - and be something that Poilievre isn’t, which is authentically masculine. Get Mark to tell the story of where he was when he heard Gretzky was traded, or where he was when Craig Simpson scored the series clincher in 1990. Hell, give me a “I remember waking up in England the morning after the Oilers won the McDavid lottery and having to stop myself from watching his highlights all day.” There is a lane for Carney that would both humanize him and expose Poilievre.

None of this is a substitute for policy renewal, and I will continue to say that the Liberals’ failures on some policy fronts is both why they’re losing (though Trudeau’s personal unpopularity exacerbated it) and is a legitimate reason to vote against them. But it’s also true that the Liberals have allowed Poilievre to cosplay as a cool man’s man when in reality he’s a fucking dweeb. If the Liberals put up a former D1 athlete as their next leader, the contrast could be very damaging to the carefully constructed narrative that the Conservatives want us to believe.

The problem for Poilievre is that unlike The Brutalist, there’s nothing actually there once you peel away the manufactured bullshit and the press strategy and just judge what’s there. With Corbet’s work, there’s a masterpiece under it all. With Poilievre, it’s the kid that tried to Well Actually everybody in class.