Why Conservatism Failed to Stop a World Gone Mad

Turning Points in History Require Revolutionary Thinking

(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to reading on the Substack platform because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)

One of the most important Greek and Roman myths, and a great prelude to set the stage for this week’s essay, is the story of Saturn (Cronus to the Greeks), the god of agriculture, the harvest, and time. This myth is a brutal reflection on the cyclical nature of civilization and the effect of time as a destructive all-devouring force.

According to the myth, Saturn ruled over the Earth during the Golden Age of Greek mythology — an idyllic time during which laws and rules were unnecessary and the people lived in peace, harmony, stability, and prosperity.

This mythological Golden Age first began after Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, enlisted her son Saturn to overthrow his tyrannical father Uranus, the god of the Sky. During that brutal war, Saturn castrated his tyrannical father, rendering him impotent, which symbolically represents the sharp boundary between eras as one generation passes into irrelevancy as the baton passes on to the next.

With Uranus dethroned and rendered impotent, Saturn assumed the throne to usher in the Golden Age of Greek mythology. But in time, this Golden Age also came to an end, as all ages do, as Saturn grew to become as tyrannical as his own father had been before him.

During his reign, Saturn’s parents warned him of a prophecy foretelling that he, like his father, would similarly be overthrown by one of his own children. A paranoid Saturn thus began to devour each of his children as they were born, swallowing them whole.

But his wife Rhea hid one child and, as the prophesy had foretold, Zeus (known as Jupiter to the Romans) did indeed overthrow his father in a brutal and bloody war during which Zeus forced Saturn to disgorge his devoured children so that they could take their place as gods, even as Zeus became the new king of the gods on Mount Olympus.

~ ~ ~

This ancient myth about Saturn devouring his children is the eternal struggle of all civilizations across the seasonal ebb and flow of history. It foreshadows the self-serving tyranny that inevitably consumes once golden societies as foundational ideas, institutions, and community bonds are exhausted (and corrupted) by the passage of time. It mirrors the angst, paranoia, rage, and conflict that consumes exhausted societies as the cycle nears completion. And it embodies the painful process of renewal required to coax a new golden age from the ashes of the last.

However, because the corrosive effects of time grind away at the fabric of civilization on a scale measured by the lifespan of gods rather than men, this multigenerational cycle is all but invisible to humanity as it navigates the challenges of day-to-day life. And so, when the unravelling starts, much of society is taken by surprise as Saturn once again begins to devour his children in a desperate bid to escape his fate.

This imagery is a perfect metaphor for the way that the Globalists of our era are gradually devouring all the core principles that once underpinned our post-WWII era — freedom of speech, limited government, transparency, equality before the law, individual rights, and so on — in their desperate bid to cling to power.

The famous painting below, called Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco Goya, depicts that story and captures the paranoia that overwhelms an era as it draws to a close.

Saturn Devouring His Son, by Francisco Goya (c. 1820 - 1823).

~ ~ ~

Western civilization has been steadily moving towards a singular destination throughout the course of the post-WWII global era — more free trade, more regulation, more social programs, more economic planning, more redistribution of wealth, more migration, more imposed “sustainability”, more social engineering, more top-down control, more censorship, more “managed” democracy, more government in general, and more corruption, grift, and war...

And to the utter dismay of conservative voters, conservative political parties have been utterly incapable of stopping this drift (Trump and the MAGA movement is another matter, which I will deal with separately towards the end of this essay).

In the first portion of this essay, it’s establishment political conservatism on both side of the Atlantic that is in my crosshairs, as represented by the likes of the George W. Bush and John McCain neocons, to the Stephen Harper and Pierre Poilievre progressive conservatives in Canada, to Europe’s never-ending string of destructive conservative leaders like Boris Johnson, Rishi Sunak, Angela Merkel, Mark Rutte, Nikolas Sarkozy, and so many others who were elected under a conservative banner and then openly advanced the global socialist agenda.

These “conservatives” might not endorse the 72+ genders celebrated by their neo-liberal peers, but otherwise they’re pretty much indistinguishable in their defence of the defunct post-WWII global system and all its failing institutions, from the United Nations and NATO all the way down to their participation in the prolific globalist think tanks and schmoozy country clubs, like the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Why?

It boils down to a simple philosophical question: what are conservatives trying to conserve?

Liberalism and conservatism are not fixed moral values across the whole of civilizational history, but change with the context of each era. In 1776, American conservatives were the Loyalists defending monarchy, while the U.S. Founding Fathers were the “destabilizing liberal reformers” who built a completely new blueprint for society based on the ideas of classical liberalism in order to break society free from abusive monarchy.

But by the late 1800s and early 1900s (during the Progressive Era), those same classical liberal ideas about limited government and division of powers were being defended by conservatives even as “progressive” reformers (in both political parties) were actively trying to destroy those limits on power in order to achieve their new “liberalizing” vision of a Big Masterful Interventionist Government that could centrally plan society’s future.

Another example brought up by Canadian rancher and retired military officer Stew Staudinger on his blog is that, in 1976, when Mao Zedong died in China, it was China’s conservatives who tried to preserve communism while Deng Xiaoping forced China to liberalize by embracing increasingly capitalist principles.

In broad strokes, liberal political movements are driven by the instinct to change, to reform, to break taboos and boundaries, and to push the system in new directions (for better or for worse). By contrast, conservatism is the instinct to preserve what has been working to avoid destabilizing the system. Each instinct plays a vital role in the cyclical course of civilization.

Once a new golden era begins, conservatism stabilizes and anchors that new system within the culture to prevent the liberal appetite for ever-changing reform from throwing a working system into chaos. But once an era has run its course and all the core anchors of that system are exhausted, establishment conservatism becomes little more than an anchor to preserve a dying system. At that point, radical reform is needed to solve the problems of the dying era in order to open the door to something new.

But who should lead the reform?

As we all know far too well, not all “liberal” calls for change lead to the same destination — indeed, the instinct to seek change often leads society down the darkest paths of all, and is often indistinguishable from the appetite for unrestrained power and central planning. The turning points in history are dangerous times as conservatism no longer anchors society around a workable system even as “liberal” reformers of all stripes compete to impose their vision of the future onto a society desperate for change.

For example, the Bolsheviks “liberalized” Russia’s dying system of monarchy and “saved” Russian peasants from crippling serfdom… by turning to Marxist authoritarianism, thus turning the page to a new era that began with civil war and was followed by seven long decades of crushing central control until the whole dystopian mess collapsed under its own weight — their new stable “golden age” was anything but golden.

It is also worth noting that the Russian civil war from 1917-1922 was ultimately fought between two groups of reformers: the Bolsheviks (Red Army) on the one side and a mix of republican-minded liberals, nationalists, and even monarchists on the other (collectively known as the White Army) who didn’t necessarily share a single cohesive vision of the future but were united in their opposition to what the Bolsheviks had to offer.

And need I tell you about the outcome of the French Revolution, which emerged as the decadent monarchical era began to implode under its own incompetence. The French Jacobin “liberals” who seized power soon turned to “conditional rights”, the money-printing press, and the guillotine to try to engineer a new utopia. Within ten years of their flavour of “liberalism”, society ousted their Reign of Terror in a kind of “counter-revolution” that launched France back into the arms of an imperial dictatorship, this time under General Napoleon, who put a stop to the guillotines, swept away the norms and codes of both the monarchical and the Jacobin era, modernized France’s political and scientific institutions, summarily crowned himself as emperor, and then launched his professional armies across the whole of Europe to usher in a new era of blood-drenched imperial conquest.

We see this in our own era as establishment post-WWII conservative political parties are utterly impotent in their efforts to put a stop to society’s unravelling. They are trying to conserve the institutions and norms of the exhausted post-WWII era even as the neo-liberals are agitating for authoritarian solutions that give themselves more power and money. Neither side offers bottom-up reforms that solve the underlying issues that are plaguing the masses (indeed, many conservative voices have been no less vocal in their calls for censorship and other liberty-destroying rules). However, the “liberalizing” proposals of the globalists are gaining traction among voters because they are promising change —much of society is jumping on board with their vision of a command-and-control economy because the conservative alternative merely offers a bleak retreat back to the “Old Normal” of the exhausted post-WWII era.

That, unfortunately, is the central lesson about the turning points between stable eras — the loudest and most well-organized “reformers” (good or bad) tend to run away with society when society is desperate for change. And establishment conservative politicians are often left utterly paralyzed to stop this because all they offer is a step back into an already defunct past. Indeed, they are often “preserving” the very institutions that have already been infiltrated and taken over by the emergent new “liberal” ideology and are increasingly forced to “borrow” from the platforms of their “liberal” competitors in order to get any attention from voters. And so, society continues to drift in the direction of liberal ideology even when the establishment conservatives are put in charge.

To deflate the momentum of the emergent neo-liberal globalist revolution, conservative reformers have to come up with a bold alternate vision of the future that reinvigorates conservative principles, but they must do it in such a way that it simultaneously solves the problems of the defunct era. A retreat to the unworkable themes and dysfunctional institutions of the defunct status quo inspires no-one and fixes nothing.

~ ~ ~

So, what is it that establishment conservatives are trying to conserve in our own era?

After the horrors and wholesale slaughter of the Second World War, the dominant political philosophy to emerge in the West was the post-WWII rules-based “liberal international” order (even as communism emerged as the dominant ideology in the East). Nationalism was soundly defeated and discredited. Colonialism was dealt a fatal blow. And the various competing visions of unrestrained government promoted by everyone from Mussolini to FDR during the previous era were severely dialed back in the West as the horrors of that era forced Western governments to rediscover the importance of individual rights and freedoms, which had largely been cast aside during two decades of enthusiastic social engineering.

The Western-aligned international community threw itself wholeheartedly behind this emergent post-WWII “rules-based” liberal international order, leaving liberals and conservatives to argue about peripheral issues, like tax rates, terms of free trade agreements, civil rights, and which distant wars to involve themselves in.

But both sides firmly agreed on the core principles of this new emergent post-WWII era, which clearly represented solutions to the problems of the prior era, but which have now evolved to become the problems of our own unravelling era.

• Free trade provided the alternative to predatory colonialism and nationalist expansionism so that countries could acquire the necessary resources to sustain their nations without invading or colonizing their neighbors.

• Multi-lateral institutions and global co-operation through institutions and treaties (like the United Nations, the World Bank, NAFTA, and the European Coal and Steel Community) emerged as the alternatives to countries “going it alone” through conquest and “might-makes-right” power projection.

• The market economy (free trade) was billed as the alternative to prosperity-destroying protectionism, and was used as a tool to deliberately entangle nations in interconnected trade relationships to make them think twice about going to war. In effect, entangling trade relationships and global financial integration became the levers of the post-WWII era to promote prosperity and discourage war.

• Ease of movement was meant to prevent abusive nations from exploiting or murdering portions of their own citizens.

• International norms were established to justify emergency interventions by the collective international community if individual nations went off the rails (like committing genocide, invading their neighbors, or enslaving portions of their own people).

• “Economic statecraft” (i.e. trade agreements, foreign aid, investment, sanctions, and undercover CIA operations) became the “carrots and sticks” to bring rogue nations into line, to defend and promote liberty and democracy, to uplift poverty-stricken nations into the market economy, and to provide access to generous international lending to help Third World countries escape poverty.

• Collective security agreements like NATO were supposed to prevent rogue nations from invading their neighbors so that even small nations could exist in peace and govern themselves.

• The voting booth (“democracy”) was meant to be opened to one and all to eradicate the abuses of unaccountable government. And public education was expanded to protect the voting booth from being overwhelmed by complete idiots.

• And human rights were enshrined into law at the level of the United Nations and the International Criminal Courts.

And it would all be underpinned by generous American military, economic, financial, and cultural power as the backstop to make sure everyone else played by these new rules. Even the dollar was repurposed as the world’s reserve currency to cement this new order into place. America became a de-facto Empire, not through conquest, but because the entirety of Western Civilization demanded a guarantor to prevent WWII from ever happening again.

In other words, the American-led post-WWII order was meant to usher in a new glorious era in which a combination of the United Nations, Adam Smith’s free markets, and John Locke’s human rights would finally allow humanity to rise to its full potential.

And for a while, it seemed to work. Sort of.

In theory, every single guiding principle of the post-WWII era listed here would seem to be a principle worth defending. And peace and prosperity seemed within reach… or at least it seemed attainable if that alternate 20th-century ideology — communism — could be stamped out. And here we are, 75 years after WWII with that rival 20th-century communist ideology thoroughly defeated and even “communist China” enthusiastically flooding the world with widgets built by private companies — by all accounts, we should be reaping the harvest of a never-ending new Golden Age.

But we’re not.

Colonialism, imperialism, monarchy, and even feudalism before that all began as “solutions” to whatever belief system came before. They each in their own time produced a flowering golden age, only to unravel into unbridled tyranny as the harvest of their era was exhausted and as the internal contradictions of those belief systems overwhelmed the system itself.

Even Julius Caesar rode into Rome to declare himself dictator to the supportive cheers of a population that was desperate for a philosopher-king to save them from corrupt and self-serving senators who had turned their once-glorious Republic into an unreformable nightmare. Yet only three generations into this new imperial “golden age”, the perverted and cruel Emperor Caligula attempted — and may have succeeded, depending on which ancient writer you choose to believe — to appoint his favorite horse, Incitatus, as Consul in the by-then greatly diminished Senate, a move designed to deliberately humiliate the senators to put them in their place." The wheel turned quickly from philosopher-king to tyrant.

And so it is with the golden age produced by post-WWII rules-based “liberal internationalism” as that era reaches its exhausted endpoint. The harvest is over. The next turning point is upon us.

The post-WWII system isn’t fixable by simply purging all the corruption. The core pillars of the system itself have turned destructive because the context in which the system was created has changed.

Free trade uplifted many developing nations. But it has also hollowed out many rural areas and smaller towns here at home as manufacturing and industry has effectively fled the continent to relocate to distant nations with lower environmental and labour standards. These nations have also learned to create “soft” barriers to strangle trade coming the other way — a kind of one-way protectionism to effect a gradual but relentless one-way wealth transfer from the West to the rest.

The rise of corporate dominance fueled massive increases in GDP, but also led to the disappearance of the independently employed middle class that is essential to preserve limited government at the voting booth. And that rise in GDP was not shared equally but instead led to a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of shareholders and the administrative classes even as everyone else now finds themselves increasingly priced out of homeownership.

And the endless rules of the “rules-based” era that cracked down on all the things that polite society didn’t approve of have turned into a tsunami of red tape — as Elon Musk recently pointed out on Twitter, “our civilization is being slowly strangled to death one regulation at a time.”

The freedom of movement that was supposed to rescue people from extreme cases of environmental or social catastrophe has turned into mass unassimilated migration, both legal and illegal, that is completely hollowing out our western cultures even as it further drives down wages, fuels crime, and erodes living standards here at home.

The military alliances that were supposed to provide stability for the post-WWII global era have become tools that corporate lobbyists can weaponize to give investors access to new markets or to give politicians the opportunity to pursue ideological crusades and topple rival nations.

The expansion of the welfare state that emerged in the aftermath of World War II, which addressed many of the vulnerabilities of those who had previously fallen through the cracks, has evolved into a massive financial dependency all across society as redistribution schemes at both the individual (welfare state), state (equalization payments), and international levels (foreign aid) have turned into a massive government-sanctioned raid to shakedown the most productive members of society and relieve them of the fruits of their own labours.

And the entire social fabric of society is unravelling because any system that shields individuals (and even entire nations) from the consequences of their bad decisions will ultimately cause that society to plunge into chaos. Rewarding bad behaviour and bad choices has consequences. The post-WWII belief that society would be uplifted by generous doses of empathy, tolerance, and forgiveness has instead proved to be recipe for social chaos, predation, crime, and all sorts of creative exploitation of the system.

Furthermore, the institutions that were showered with power and money in order to watch over the post-WWII system and guide society with their technical expertise have likewise become self-serving and predatory, from the United Nations all the way down to USAID, to much of academia and the scientific institutions, to the multitude of NGOs who live off government largess. Where once they existed to serve the people, they now exist largely to serve themselves and keep the grant money flowing… even as many have been repurposed by opportunists who have infiltrated those institutions to pursue their own self-serving agendas.

And so, the entire post-WWII era — with all its treaties, institutions, and core beliefs — is now collapsing despite the fact that it was once the medication that healed the problems of the Depression and WWII eras.

No system is eternal because time is an all-devouring force. All eras eventually exhaust themselves. History is cyclical.

But with no obvious remedy, establishment conservatives are lining up to defend that unravelling post-WWII system in the belief that if only the right people (i.e. those seen to have pure intentions and lots of credentials to demonstrate their technical expertise) can be put back in charge of the Titanic and enough corruption can be purged from the engine room, the sinking ship can be brought back to life.

They are wrong.

~ ~ ~

Before I move on to discuss Trump’s MAGA movement and the pragmatic solutions he is trying to bring to the table, I want to take a moment to zero in on our leading conservative politician here in Canada, Pierre Poilievre, because he provides an ideal case study of why conservative career politicians cannot lead society out of its current slump.

In the midst of a stable “golden age”, the last thing you want is a visionary leader to lead society on a new crusade to distant horizons. As long as society is firmly anchored in its culture and things are working smoothly, career politicians who make a living by testing the winds of public opinion to see which way society’s appetites are trending (and then run out ahead of that mostly stable herd to pose as their “leader”) are preferable to visionaries who risk destabilizing society with their radical ideas.

But once a golden age comes to an end as the solutions to the problems of the prior era begin to become destructive, society begins to get disoriented and churns around in circles like a panicking herd of cattle. And so, the career politician that’s gauging the direction of the wind is merely placing himself at the head of a disoriented herd. But a disoriented herd cannot lead itself to safety, and neither can a career politician who takes his cues from that disoriented herd.

The only way out of the chaos is for a visionary statesman to provide society with a clear new path back to firm ground in order to calm the herd and give it a new direction.

But Mr. Poilievre has been the quintessential risk-averse career politician who sits on the fence on every issue until he sees which way the wind is blowing.

After nine years under Justin Trudeau’s disastrous Liberal Party leadership, Mr. Poilievre’s ratings at the polls were climbing as his party picked up electoral support from the bleeding Left-wing parties who have spent the last nine years systematically dismantled Canada’s culture, economy, social cohesion, and future.

With Trudeau’s reign imploding in the polls, the media had already crowned Poilievre as Canada’s next prime minister — his turn in power seemed all but guaranteed. But then the globalist Liberals ditched Mr. Trudeau and started hyping up a “better” replacement in the form of “highly credentialed” globalist Mark Carney 😡, and Mr. Poilievre’s lead has all but evaporated, as shown by the poll below. As it turns out, Poilievre was only ever the “other guy” to save Canada from the “current guy” — he offered no real vision to capture anyone’s imagination and solve the problems of our unravelling post-WWII era.

February 18th, 2025 Angus Reid Poll of Voter Intentions.

It should surprise no-one. Mr. Poilievre’s “common sense conservatives” (his slogan, not mine) offer nothing new other than the promise of more competent leadership of the same exact broken post-WWII system. He is no visionary reformer with clear solutions to guide Canada out of the now exhausted post-WWII era.

And so, as soon as Trudeau’s party announced it would replace Trudeau with someone with more impressive credentials, with rebranded false promises of more globalist solutions, and with a slick marketing campaign to portray Mr. Carney as some kind of globalist philosopher-king with an authoritarian vision that can unlock the gates to a new golden age, and Mr. Poilievre is left floundering at the polls.

On everything from Covid vaccines and lockdowns, to his blind warmongering support for Ukraine War, to “climate change”, Poilievre’s default risk-averse position is to follow in the footsteps of the post-WWII status quo while waffling on the fence on lesser issues until it becomes clear which way public opinion is trending.

He even went as far as smearing Christine Anderson (a sitting member of Germany’s AfD party in the European Parliament and an outspoken critic of Covid tyranny) as “vile”, mirroring the smears of European media and politicians who have labeled her party as “far right” — and then went on to censor three of his MPs for the “crime” of meeting with her during her Canadian tour (his MPs were forced to issue a public statement of regret to avoid being kicked out of the Conservative party) — all to appease the slavering media that would have loved to leverage that “scandal” to end his career — not exactly a champion of free speech, is he?

And then there’s the issue of “climate change” — the foremost “noble lie” used to sell the globalist agenda to an unsuspecting public — again Mr. Poilievre refuses to confront the fact that the entire thing is an easily demonstrable hoax. So, instead of using this opportunity to dismantle the core propaganda tool behind the socialist agenda, which claims that humanity is on the brink of an apocalypse unless society embraces more top-down national and international central planning, he sidesteps the issue entirely by suggesting that giving climate subsidies to big corporations are a better solution than the Liberal’s carbon taxes. How brave.

And then Mark Carney comes along and also says he’ll cancel Trudeau’s carbon tax (and proposes to put a “price on carbon” for big industry instead 🤪), leaving Poilievre rudderless and impotent as the differences between their parties evaporate, even as the core ideological pillar of the socialist agenda remains unchallenged.

It was predictable from a mile away that this would happen, yet the Conservatives, lacking the courage to confront the climate hoax head-on because of the firestorm this would have produced in the media, walked right into the waiting trap.

Part of the problem is that many of his own party members, as well as all prior Conservative leaders in Canada from Stephen Harper all the way back to Brian Mulroney, have all put their names to those climate agreements over the past decades. Stephen Harper made extensive climate commitments during his reign. And Brian Mulroney was integral to Margaret Thatcher’s effort to ignite and then leverage CO2 hysteria as a cover to push the West towards nuclear power in the 1980s with the goal of breaking the stranglehold of the communist-sympathizing coal mining unions in the UK and, most importantly, to prevent Western countries from ever repeating the 1970s’ Oil Crisis, which left America at risk of running out of oil because Middle Eastern oil sheikhs threatened to turn off the taps to the West during the Yom-Kippur War of 1973 and the Iranian Revolution of 1979 — a story that I’ve told in detail in my recent book Plunderers of the Earth: the erosion of civilization, the mad crusade to change the climate, and the untold stories of soil and CO2 (Amazon Affiliate Link).

But to confront the climate lie, Poilievre would expose that his predecessors were either wrong or deliberately lied about the climate to pursue a hidden agenda. This would put him on a collision course with his fellow party members, some of whom likely genuinely believe the climate story and others who have put their signature on it in some way. If Poilievre suddenly changed course on this issue, it would trigger an instant revolt within his own party that would likely see him relieved of his leadership position and possibly kicked out of the party for wrongthink. Whether he believes the hoax or not, he is held hostage by his party’s history and by his fellow party members who have all staked their reputations on this issue and want to be re-elected.

The climate hoax is one of the load-bearing myths of the post-WWII era, which has evolved to rationalize many of the core institutions of the post-WWII era and justify the expansion of federal and international authority at the expense of local autonomy. It would trigger a rebellion among Canada’s institutions if he tried to shake the pillars upon which they stand. And it would trigger a veritable revolution both inside and outside of the Conservative party to challenge this central pillar of the post-WWII system.

The only solution is for a rogue outsider who has been critical of the climate hoax from day one of his political career to muscle in on the party, as Trump did in the United States. Even then, Trump only succeeded because he was self-funded (which Canada’s election system doesn’t allow), and he already had prominent name-recognition so media slurs didn’t have the same effect as they would on an unknown outsider. The only hope in Canada to challenge these kinds of long-entrenched post-WWII beliefs through a new “rebellious” party — but that’s a hard nut to crack in a tightly managed system (from media to election committees to the donor class) that instinctively closes ranks to keep any destabilizing upstart anti-globalist party out.

Similarly, when President Trump confronted Canada about its drug, crime, and border problems and threatened to impose tariffs, Poilievre immediately jumped to join the popular chorus of “Team Canada” leaders agitating for a “dollar-for-dollar tariff war”. The Liberals are deliberately provoking this tariff war as cover for fresh spending, to shift the blame for Trudeau’s mismanagement of Canada’s deteriorating economy onto Trump, and to position Mark Carney as the alleged experienced banker who can lead Canada out of this manufactured “crisis”. Yet Poilievre parrots their “Orange Man Bad” rhetoric at every turn because the crowd is currently being whipped into a frenzy by liberals and their co-conspirators in the media, and Poilievre is rushing to be at the head of that panicking crowd.

And what are Mr. Poilievre’s proposed solutions to Canada’s economic woes? “Canada First”. But what does “Canada First” actually mean? More free trade deals, more top-down economic planning, and expanding our economic dependency on authoritarian China to take up the slack left by decoupling from the United States.

Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

None of those solutions confront the core issues that are unravelling the post-WWII era in Canada — it won’t bring back manufacturing; it won’t reduce the overbearing dominance of mega-corporations; it won’t revive the independently employed middle class, family farms, and main street businesses; it won’t fix over-crowded cities; it doesn’t fix the social tensions created by mass migration without assimilation; it doesn’t wipe away suffocating over-regulation; it doesn’t revive local autonomy; and it doesn’t reduce top-down central planning.

And it implies a stunning level of naivety to think that America would allow Canada to violate the Monroe Doctrine by expanding its political, economic, and energy entanglements with America’s #1 adversary, China — indeed, as I explained in a previous article, funding for many of the climate change protests and indigenous protests that were used to paralyse pipelines and oil and gas projects to the BC coast (but not pipeline projects to the United States!) were funded by various US organizations, some of which, like the Tides Foundation, have now been revealed by the USAID audit to have received funding from the US Deep State (surprise, surprise) — and that began long before Trump came to power.

Poilievre’s solutions also ignore the realities of what would it take to “get those pipelines built” to sell more oil to China and to dismantle the existing interprovincial trade barriers that are (according to both Poilievre and Carney) allegedly the primary reason why our local communities are struggling. Once again, it would require transferring even more power into the hands of the federal government in order to forcibly override opposition from provincial governments, which are using those artificial “soft” trade barriers to shield themselves from competition from the other provinces.

But Quebec has already signalled in no uncertain terms that it would never allow the Energy East pipeline to be built, nor would it ever give an inch of power back to the federal government to dismantle those provincial trade barriers. Trying to use federal powers to forcibly overrule Quebec to impose his federalist vision would likely trigger a constitutional crisis with Quebec (and possibly also with other provinces) — indeed, the appetite for a fresh referendum on separation in Quebec is already growing as we speak. So, all of Poilievre’s “solutions” are obviously dead in the water as he remains trapped within the post-WWII paradigm that has nothing left to give.

And as for long-overdue political reforms to fix Canada’s utterly dysfunctional parliamentary system, which gives quasi-dictatorial powers to the Prime Minister and is completely tilted towards Ontario and Quebec while treating the other provinces like colonial backwaters (as discussed in my recent article called Clipping Leviathan’s Fingers), that is also not a reform that Mr. Poilievre would be willing to undertake. He was quite clear that there would be no constitutional reforms forthcoming during his interview with Jordan Peterson on January 2nd, 2025, in which he declared that in his view Canada has "the best system of government in the history of the world — the parliamentary system. Not the best government, but the best system of government.”

In every way that matters, Mr. Poilievre is conserving not just the post-WWII order but also Canada’s dysfunctional political architecture, which allows the Laurentian East to completely dominate both the West and the Maritimes for its own purposes. Poilievre just cannot see beyond the lens of his conservatism (or lacks the courage to leap into radical reforms), despite the fact that all the things he is conserving are at the core of what is currently tearing Canada apart.

I could go on an on, but I think the point is well made. Until establishment conservatives are willing to confront the uncomfortable fact that the core tenets of the post-WWII era have themselves become the source of the West’s unravelling, they cannot lead their nations out of crisis and are, in fact, partly to blame for fueling that crisis as they instinctually continue to double down on exhausted post-WWII era solutions.

And so, the radical globalist reformers are running circles around them as they promise voters that they can deliver utopia if voters just give them even more power to take social engineering “to the next level” under the “visionary” leadership of globalist authoritarians like Mark Carney. Any party that promises to “fix everything with more authoritarian control” is a heady lure for a demoralized and directionless society. Society is clamouring for another Julius Caesar. The globalists are offering them one. And the conservatives are failing to offer any better alternatives to defuse that authoritarian appetite.

Even if Mr. Poilievre does manage to get elected because Canadian anger with the Liberals keeps Mark Carney out of power, his deferral to all the institutions and assumptions of the past era are a guarantee that his leadership will fail to rescue society from the unravelling.

At best, perhaps Canada’s out-of-control spending and rising debts will get reined in. But beyond that, the lens through which his party views the world has trapped him on the same rudderless path as all his other conservative peers in other Western nations (from Mark Rutte to Rishi Sunak, and beyond) who offered nothing but a continuation of the emergent globalist order as they are forced to mimic the globalists’ authoritarian revolution in order to appeal to voters who are desperate for someone to save them.

~ ~ ~

And that brings us to President Trump and the MAGA movement, which is an altogether different beast.

One of the core themes that emerge from this essay is that ideology-driven reforms typically lead to disaster whereas the turning points that lead to new stable “golden ages” are driven by pragmatism — practical solutions to real world problems that break the long-established “consensus” of the prior era and roll back government overreach.

The US Constitution that emerged in the aftermath of the American Revolution was a practical response to tie thirteen newly liberated colonies together in order to build a military and economic block strong enough to fend off America’s British and European enemies. This new American vision of the future was informed by political philosophy and history, but wasn’t a dogmatic imposition of any belief system. As such, it was the opposite of the French Revolution that happened only a decade later on the other side of the Atlantic, which was driven by ideologues intent on imposing a government-led social engineering program to artificially impose a new egalitarian utopia.

If you read the Federalist Papers in which several of the U.S. Founding Fathers argued back and forth about how they should structure their Constitution, you can see how they were deeply practical men struggling with deeply pragmatic issues about how to keep the government off people’s backs and prevent America’s enemies from retaking the continent. This is in marked contrast to the radical Jacobin ideologues driving the bloody hysteria of the French Revolution, who were obsessed with re-engineering society to achieve “radical equality, centralized power, and revolutionary justice”.

The post-WWII “rules-based” international era and all its institutions likewise emerged as another pragmatic response to slam the door on nationalism, protectionism, institutional discrimination, genocide, and war after the world exhausted itself in the twin crises of the 1930s Great Depression and the 1940s Second World War. Some of FDR’s ideas about a “Planned Economy” certainly bled into this new “rules-based” era, but many of its central beliefs simply emerged as practical solutions to practical problems. Those ideas only later hardened to become the dogmatic tenets of the globalist ideology of today, but they didn’t strictly start out that way.

Even Deng Xiaoping’s turn towards state-directed capitalism in 1978 was about putting an end to the command-economy that had ruled China under Mao. Deng’s pragmatic reforms were a tacit admission that China’s dogmatic embrace of communism had failed.

President Trump may be governing under a Republican banner and his MAGA movement may be composed of conservatives who trace their conservatism back to the classical liberal patriotism of their Founding Fathers, but they are all united in their open hostility to the failed assumptions and defunct institutions of the post-WWII era. That is the storm that swept Trump to power.

Trump 2.0 represents a counter-revolution to put a stop to the radical beliefs pushed by the revolutionary globalists, but it is anything but a return to the conservatism of the post-WWII era — indeed, most of the conservatives of the pre-Trump era (Bush, Cheney, Romney, Bolton, Pence, and so on) are being deliberately and forcefully sidelined, leaving many to openly align with the globalist Democrats in order to try to preserve their cherished post-WWII system.

In effect, Trump’s first war (now won) was to push the establishment conservatives out of the Republican Party to make way for his MAGA reformers. His second war (also now won) was to overcome the Global Socialists at the polls. And now he is widening that war to purge the globalists out of America’s institutions, expose their corrupt influence networks, and confront their globalist peers on the world stage.

So, how does MAGA’s vision for the future fit into this picture as a political philosophy, where are President Trump’s reforms taking America, and why is he making inroads where so many other conservatives could not?

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And now, back to President Trump, the MAGA movement, and the pragmatic new political philosophy that is emerging from his counter-revolution against the Globalists.

His opening volley over the first few weeks of his second term (nicknamed the “Days of Thunder” by his former political advisor Steve Bannon) have not only dismantled the grip of the global socialists over America’s institutions, but they are equally dismantling the pillars of the now defunct post-WWII era with pragmatic solutions that establishment conservatives have not dared to touch.

Turning points in history break all of the norms, rules, and firmly held assumptions of the earlier era. But if those heretical “rule-breaking” solutions stick and actually begin to reverse the damage of the unravelling prior era, then they become the staunchly defended bedrock for a new stable era.

Trump 2.0. is emerging as a radical reformer…

President Trump’s first term was noisy, but most of the solutions he turned to and most of the personalities he accumulated in his inner circle during his first term were drawn straight from the playbook of the post-WWII era. And Swamp Creatures like Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, and John Bolton who served in his first administration were straight up old-guard neo-conservatives drawn from the establishment Republican party.

At that time, Trump was already openly critical of NATO, he renegotiated NAFTA because he was unhappy with it, he withdrew from the climate accords, and he was a vocal critic of the Democrats, the “fake news”, and “Republicans in Name Only (Rhinos)”. But in the end, there was a mostly unbroken line of continuity that extends from Obama’s reign through Trump’s first term and into the Biden era.

And everything that Trump did during his first term that stepped outside of the norms of the post-WWII era were erased with days of leaving the presidency by the stroke of President Biden’s executive pen. Had he not been re-elected in 2024 (or if he had merely continued straight into a second term in 2020), he would probably have been nothing more than a noisy footnote in the philosophical and political evolution of the United States.

Trump’s second term is something else altogether.

Four years in the wilderness and under the relentless hammer of globalist lawfare have done wonders for Trump’s understanding of the true nature of the globalist monster and what must be done to defeat it.

Equally importantly, that four-year window has done wonders to help those of us who are not on board with the emergent global socialist order to understand the true nature of the globalist belief system and the depths of its infiltration into the system.

And it has disabused us all of the idea that the solutions to the Great Unravelling can be found in a conservative return to the Old Normal of the post-WWII era as we understand why the beliefs and institutions of the prior era no longer serve a beneficial purpose but have in fact become the source of our current problems.

And so, here comes Trump 2.0 on a collision course with all of the central pillars of the post-WWII era: free trade, internationalism, multi-lateral co-operation, collective security agreements, the climate change narrative, hyper-regulation, borrow-and-spend federal spending, over-taxation, mass migration, military adventurism, woke social engineering, and all the many institutions that have underpinned these core ideas.

And yet, Trump’s republicanism is conservative in nature, it’s just that his republican vision isn’t rooted in the institutions and beliefs of the post-WWII era. Rather than trying to social engineer a new top-down Utopia, like the globalists are doing, he is reaching further back in time to revive proven strategies from earlier eras to solve the problems of our own. He is a pragmatist.

His second-term inner circle reflects this pragmatic mix, with a strange collection of voices that span the full range from dyed-in-the-wool libertarian thinkers, to Tea Party revolutionaries, to tough-nosed old-school lawmen, to big government technocrats who want to conquer the stars and relaunch the equivalent of the Manhattan Project to give America a lead in the race to master Artificial Intelligence. And Trump is plucking solutions from all of them.

And so, rather than try to sum up his political philosophy — and indeed, I think it is too early in the story to say that this has jelled in a cohesive political philosophy — I think it is more useful to try to understand the shape of things to come by looking at some of the solutions he is applying to solve the accumulated problems of the post-WWII era.

By rejecting the climate hoax and withdrawing from (and defunding) the international institutions that enable it, he is pulling the rug out from under the globalist order. It cannot be overstated how important it is to knock out this central pillar of the globalist belief system because it is the “noble lie” upon which much of the emergent globalist order is built — it justifies global central planning, global institutions to study and manage the “problem”, the entanglement of further treaties that rob nations of their sovereignty, national commitments that override local autonomy, mass migration (climate “refugees”) that is being used to erase national culture, and massive financial redistribution between social classes and between nations in the name of “climate equity”.

It’s not an overstatement that the climate hoax is the central pillar of the emergent global order — even globalist architect and future Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney makes that very clear in his book (Values: Building a Better World For All) .

By tackling the climate hoax head on, Trump is not only destroying the philosophical well-spring of the destructive globalist agenda, but he is also clearing the way for people to be able to recognize how their local ecological crises (forest fires, droughts, floods, declining aquifers, nutrient depletion, and so much more) are caused by local ecological mismanagement, local deforestation, and local soil erosion, not by global CO2.

This is a key step in reviving localism after a century of internationalism and central planning. As the illusion of a global crisis falls away, it clears people’s minds to begin finding their own practical solutions to their local ecological crises instead of waiting helplessly for distant global central planners to save them — all of which helps revive individual and local community empowerment, leads to healthier local ecosystems, and helps reverse the sense of helplessness and hopelessness of the prior era.

Another central reform of his new administration is that he is working on resurrecting a wall of tariffs for his Fortress America to give North American businesses a home advantage. To heal a hollowed-out economy, you have to change the incentives in order to bring manufacturing and local businesses back so that America can build and make stuff again. As you rebuild the hollowed-out middle class, you also rebuild the anti-socialist voting block that’s most likely to safeguard liberty, property rights, and limited government when they go to vote at the polls.

Trump has openly stated that the McKinley presidency (from 1897 to 1901) serves as his model for these tariffs. In his own words: “President McKinley was the one responsible for creating a vast sum of money that Teddy Roosevelt spent… That's one of the reasons that we're going to bring the name of Mount McKinley back, because I think he deserves it. (source). By restoring the name of Mount McKinley, Alaska’s tallest mountain (which Obama changed to Denali in 2015), he’s symbolically marking the change in how America plans to manage trade with the rest of the world.

The barb he launched at Teddy Roosevelt in that quote is equally telling. Teddy Roosevelt was the US president under which big federal government spending really began to take off. Trump is signalling that the era of out-of-control spending is over. By default, this signals an economic shift away from government and back towards private enterprise as the engine of wealth creation in America, in marked contrast to the post-WWII era in which the government was spending an ever-greater share of your money on your behalf.

Another of the first things Trump and DOGE have done straight out of the gate of his second term is audit USAID — the first of many institutions that are about to be put under DOGE’s microscope. In doing so, he is dismantling the vast tsunami of cash that is flooding out into endless institutions, media outlets, NGOs, and undercover CIA operations. And so, yet another of the central pillars of the post-WWII era — clandestine economic statecraft — is being dismantled.

Both abroad and at home, this signals that democracy is being returned to the people rather than being a carefully crafted piece of state-orchestrated theatre managed by the Deep State.

But how do you prevent it all from growing back?

Once again, Trump’s proposals offer a glimpse into how he might address this. He has suggested that his wall of tariffs would serve as a replacement for federal income taxes in the United States. (On February 22nd his team reconfirmed this plan). This puts a serious permanent damper on federal spending and promises to shrink the federal government. (Hopefully he cements this into the Constitution by repealing the 16th Amendment, which allowed the federal government to begin collecting federal income taxes. This reform hasn’t been suggested yet, but hopefully someone can whisper it in his ear.)

The government can’t keep expanding its federal institutions if Trump uses this switch from income taxes to tariffs to cut off the ability of Congress and the Executive Branch to keep expanding the federal governments’ tax haul. Plus, as Fortress America gains momentum as manufacturing returns home, foreign imports are likely to shrink as more stuff gets manufactured at home, and thus tariff revenue is likely to shrink, which creates a natural pressure to force America’s federal institutions to become even leaner, not fatter over time.

And unlike during his first term during which Trump himself was a prolific spender, shrinking government spending is very much at the top of Trump 2.0’s current agenda. He has recognized that America’s deteriorating finances, courtesy of a century of post-WWII Keynesian economic dogma, has become an existential threat to America’s future. Elon Musk has openly stated that the presidency is in a race against time to prevent America from going bankrupt. As Elon Musk reaffirms: “Our goal is to try to get a trillion dollars out of the deficit. If the deficit is not put under control - America will go bankrupt.”

The decision to switch from federal income taxes to tariffs also signals a massive shift in foreign policy to adapt America to a Multi-Polar World. He has promised reciprocal tariffs. On everybody. Likeminded countries will still trade together. But the one-sided trade of the post-WWII era, in which countries with poor labour standards and low environmental standards are able to undercut America is over. As is the one-way protectionism that other countries have used to grow their economy at America’s expense.

As Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained recently in an interview:

“For decades the United States allowed uneven trade imbalances to develop. During the Cold War, do you know why we did it? We did it because we felt like, we want countries to be strong economically even if it means they’re cheating, because we don’t want them to fall victim to some internal Marxist coup that overturns their government, or what have you.

“Those days are gone. These are rich, developed economies. And ultimately, who can argue against the fact that, whatever they charge us, we should charge them. Whatever they prohibit, if they don’t allow American companies to do it, we should not allow their companies to do it here. American banks can’t even operate in Canada. So, there has to be reciprocity here.

“We can continue to work together on all kinds of things, but whether it’s Canada, Mexico, China, anybody else, when it comes to economics and trade, there has to be reciprocity, there has to be fairness. How can anybody argue against that?

“The days where we just allow countries to take advantage of us, that has to end. That’s not good for the global order. That leads to unbalances that create friction points...”

This switch to tariffs and reciprocal trade also re-affirms America as a self-contained economic block. Those within it have no tariffs; those on the outside exist in their own spheres. They can either be friendly or do their own thing. In essence, it allows Russia, China, and other countries to retreat into their own spheres, or cultivate friendly relations, as they wish.

By repositioning America as a North American Empire surrounded by a single, fair, and simple system of tariffs, rather than a global empire that is flooding the world with its never-ending complex and coercive treaties, Trump is giving his nod of acceptance to the emerging multi-polar world… and thereby defusing the tensions that would otherwise have been more likely to lead to war.

This move is essentially a retreat from the past century of liberal internationalism that used free trade treaties as a carrot and stick to shape the economic policies of other countries. This is a return to a position that’s closer in line with America’s core security policy during the 19th century, known as the Monroe Doctrine, which established the United States as a North American hegemon — no other Great Power was allowed a toehold on the continent — but also, by extension, established that America was happy to trade with but wouldn’t seek to meddle with everyone else’s business in their backyard.

This repositioning is also reflected in his emerging military reforms as Trump works to bolster America’s naval power, which signals that America will actively defend the open seaways that are essential for global trade, while retreating from its aggressive projection of powers onto other continents.

He has followed through by warning Europe that it would now increasingly be responsible for its own security on the European continent. The blanket security guarantees of the post-WWII era are over; it’s time for Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security. No more free rides.

He is also currently working to normalize relations with Russia and re-establish friendly trade relations between them, and has put a proposal on the table for the US, China, and Russia to each halve their defense spending, signalling an end to revived Cold War that the globalists have been stoking.

The terms of his peace proposal for the Ukraine are equally telling, which would establish the Ukraine as a neutral nation (no NATO membership) and allow Russia to keep the conquered Russian-speaking regions, which re-affirms that Great Powers have a natural sphere of influence that the others should respect.

But the extra “deal” that he is pushing on the Ukraine is especially telling, because he is currently seeking a deal to give the U.S. preferential access to Ukraine’s “rare earth and critical minerals”, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, which would allow the U.S. to recoup the loans it made to the Ukraine to fund the Ukraine War and reduce U.S. dependency on China for these minerals in exchange for aid, security, and help rebuilding the country after the war.

In other words, America’s security umbrella is no longer free of charge. He’s still happy to fix things out on the world stage, but there’s a price to be paid for failing to solve things without America’s help.

Another clue about what the new era might look like come from Vice President J.D. Vance’s eye-opening speech in Munich on February 14th, in which he specifically pointed out that the greatest danger to Western Civilization was the enemy within — this was a direct confrontation with Europe’s leaders about their embrace of authoritarianism, their censorship of free speech, and their erosion of democratic principles. In essence, he laid out the gauntlet — fix this, or America’s and Europe’s unshakable post-WWII friendship is over. Saturn is being commanded to disgorge his children.

This monumental speech also signalled that America is returning to defending its own core classical liberal values back home on its own turf, which were on the verge of disappearing altogether under Biden’s globalist jackboot. Without values like freedom of speech with which to challenge establishment dogma, neither science nor democracy can function. America is aspiring to return to being beacon of freedom. It may still be on shaky legs, but a clear change of direction is taking shape.

I could go on, but I think the point is well made that Trump is in the process of renegotiating all the core assumptions of the post-WWII era and the globalist monstrosity that has evolved out of that post-WWII era. Piece by piece, these pillars of the last century are being dismantled, reformed, or replaced by something completely new and pragmatic. The global social engineering of the liberal international post-WWII era appears to be shifting towards more of a policy of “live and let live”.

The globalists are not going willingly into that goodnight — there is likely still a hard fight ahead before the globalist movement is rendered impotent — but if Trump’s reforms succeed in healing the problems created by the post-WWII era and if he doesn’t get derailed by the globalists, this may mark the beginning of a new era and a very different world.

And so, while post-WWII conservatism has consistently failed to stop the advancing globalist tide because it has become trapped in the beliefs and institutional order of the post-WWII era, Trump’s revival of 19th-century pragmatic republicanism is reversing that tide and opening the door to a new chapter in the story.

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This allows me to wrap up this rather long deep dive with a humorous observation.

Mount Rushmore has four faces of four presidents carved into it, each marking the key turning points in America’s evolution.

George Washington liberated America from Britain by serving as America’s foremost military leader during America’s Revolutionary War, and then followed up by serving as its founding president.

"The preservation of the sacred fire of Liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people." — George Washington

Thomas Jefferson is arguably the most iconic father of America’s Constitution and the lead author of America’s radical experiment in liberty and self-government.

"We act not for ourselves but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to show whether man can be trusted with self - government." — Thomas Jefferson

Abraham Lincoln marked the point when slavery ended and when America endured its most severe test in the form of the Civil War, which, through the terms of the peace that followed, bound a bitterly divided people back together as a permanent indivisible nation dedicated to preserving the liberty and legal equality of all of its citizens.

"I leave you hoping that the lamp of liberty will burn in your bosoms until there shall no longer be a doubt that all men are created free and equal." — Abraham Lincoln

And Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency arguably marked the turning point during which America became a global economic and industrial giant — confident and assertive on the world stage — as its footprint expanded from coast to coast across the breadth of the North American continent. Even the Panama Canal was constructed by America under his watch, often called the "eighth wonder of the world" because of the momentous engineering feat required to construct it and because of its revolutionary impact on the global shipping industry. All combined, America emerged as a truly global power under his watch.

"The first requisite of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight - that he shall not be a mere passenger." — Theodore Roosevelt

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Trump became the fifth face on Mount Rushmore for returning America to its philosophical and economic roots as an industrial and economic powerhouse, as a beacon of freedom, and as a continental North American Empire that recognizes both its strengths and its limits after a century of losing itself in the weeds of military adventurism, global social engineering, and government overreach both abroad and at home?

“This is a republic of proud citizens who are united by our common conviction that America is the greatest nation in all of history. We are, and must always be, a land of hope, of light, and of glory to all the world. This is the precious inheritance that we must safeguard at every single turn.” — Donald J. Trump

It’s honestly too early to tell whether his reforms will survive the globalists’ efforts to resist him, and whether he himself will be able to resist the urge to grow unchecked presidential power and ambition rather than to rein it in once he is done purging the globalists from America’s institutions. Only time will tell.

But if he succeeds in reigniting the candle of liberty on the North American continent after a century of growing darkness, rebalancing America’s relationship with a multi-polar world, and especially if Canada and Greenland are enticed to voluntarily join in the American experiment as his reforms continue to take shape, he will have earned a face on Mount Rushmore… and that would go down as the most epic troll in history. 😈