Slouching Towards Bethlehem

So, Reader's Digest is referring to the Second Coming of Trudeau. This is not a joke.

 











 



Yep. The thin red line between "saviour of the Liberal Party" and "actual son-of-God Saviour" has disappeared. Get used to it, because this will be happening a lot in the next few years. They are going to make this man into the literal embodiment of divinity. And Canadians are going to swallow it, hook, line, and sinker.

 

And you all know it. You don't even do a good job of hiding it. I know and you know and he knows that this country and everything and everyone in it is his birthright. It is completely and utterly inexorable.

 

Why do we pretend to have a democracy? Why don't we just stop pretending to be more advanced than places that are ruled by kings and generalissimos? Why stretch out this incredibly boring story that everyone knows the end to already? The Liberals are having a pretend leadership race, which will lead to a pretend election, which will lead to a pretend administration in which we all close our eyes and pretend that we have returned to the glory days. 

 

A few months ago, Liberals in Ontario chose between smiles and sunshine and hard solutions. They knew what had to be done to fix the province, and collectively decided not to do it. In a collective failure of nerve, they convinced themselves that we could just blow off Ontario's woes with relentless positivity. Deliberately, purposefully, they took the easy way out and justified it after the fact.

 

Under Prime Minister Trudeau II, the second of his line, we can expect the same type of head-in-the-sand Chavez-esque denial that pervades left-wing cults of personality everywhere. We know Justin has no plan for the economy or for anything else and no policy to speak of. But Canadians don't want policy or plans. Plans involve work. Plans involve sacrifice. Vague assurances about "bringing Canadians together" and "restoring our reputation abroad" go down easy. If people remain poor, that's the fault of rich people who just won't get with the program and give up their wealth. And if Justin continues any of Harper's policies, his people will have absolutely no problem with that. As a country, we will convince ourselves that we've never had it so good. We must, because the alternative is to admit we're screwed.

 

A Trudeau victory will spell the end of the concept of the Canadian voter as rational, policy-literate, and honest. We are dealing with people who will allow themselves to be swept up in the return of Trudeaumania. They are saying to political people, "Treat us like idiots." And they most certainly will be treated like idiots, and their disappointed whining after the fact when they realized they got duped again will be ignored, as well it should.

 

These are the same people who proclaimed the CPC guilty as soon as the robocalls story broke, decided that our voting system is "antiquated" the moment it produced a CPC government, whip themselves up into furors over the federal deficit while ignoring the provincial one in (insert province here), praise Obama for doing the same things Bush did, endorse Scandinavian socialism without having a clue what that actually looks like, and clutch their pearls for fear of the big bad scary Republicans who proved back in October that they couldn't hit water if they fell out of a boat. These are your rational voters. 

 

I can only hope that this will finally do it. The election of an unready and unsteady twit who led a dead party back to the heights of power simply because he was born into the right family, paper thin resume be damned. This will finally convince conservatives that the conversation with voters is not worth having. It has to. What else could do it?