At first glance, this last week hasn’t been good news for the conservative cause.
On Monday, April 28, Canada rejected apple-eating, journalist-bashing, truth-speaking Pierre Poilievre in favor of banking magnate and globalist Mark Carney. In fact, it rejected him so emphatically that the man no longer has a job in politics.
For American conservatives, the man to blame was Donald Trump, who seems to have thought a TruthSocial post about Canada becoming the 51st state was in good taste the morning of the election.
The trouble was that “[t]he incessant, and profoundly idiotic, rhetoric of admitting Canada into the union — Why? So that Democrats can win every election? — cratered not only Poilievre’s popularity but the popularity of Canada’s national hero,” Daniel Flynn wrote in these pages.
Canada was just the beginning of the story. Australian Labor Party Leader Anthony Albanese declared victory on Saturday, May 3, against his conservative opponents, reportedly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) riding on the adverse reaction Australians have had to Trump’s tariffs.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, “The election [in Australia] is the latest snapshot of how voters are reacting to a shifting world order as President Trump targets countries with tariffs, pivots toward Russia and uses harsh rhetoric about Washington’s traditional allies. Polls show voters in Australia, Canada, and the U.K. view Washington more unfavorably since Trump took office.”
The Trump-effect on the global stage seems to be to drive voters away from any candidate who looks even remotely similar to Donald Trump. That’s not really how conservatives hoped 2025 would go.
That’s the big picture. But sometimes the big picture obscures the more important point one could glean from paying attention to the details. Nobody wants Mark Carney — who has been a public proponent of globalism and hangs out with the likes of the World Economic Forum — running America’s northern neighbor. That said, Carney won the Canadian election, not because he was a globalist (although having the backing of globalist institutions certainly helped), but because he employed Trump’s nationalistic language.
Philip Cunliffe, writing for Compact magazine, argued that the Canadian election didn’t so much signify a defeat of Trump’s brand of national populism, as an embrace of it. Cunliffe pointed out that, as recently as 2017, Justin Trudeau had bragged that Canada had at last transcended nationalism. It had become, in his mind, a part of a global movement bigger than a mere nation.
But that kind of rhetoric doesn’t win elections, and Carney — for all his globalism — knew it. “In electing a consummate globalist to defend Canadian sovereignty, Canadian voters exhibited a voluble national pride more commonly seen south of the border. In that sense, even if Trump may not get his 51st state of the Union, he has nonetheless imposed the value of sovereignty and national independence on the archetypal post-national state,” Cunliffe said.
Carney, whether he acknowledges it or not, was forced to adopt the language of national self-interest. American tariffs aren’t in Canada’s best interest, and so Carney promised to go to the negotiating table “on our own terms.” Becoming the 51st state is also not in Canada’s best interest, so Carney promised to make sure that never happens.
It Wasn’t Only Canada
Canada wasn’t a one-off either. Saturday’s election in Australia demonstrated very similar rhetoric coming from the leftist Labor Party. During his victory speech, Anthony Albanese remarked: “We do not need to beg, or borrow or copy from anywhere else. We do not seek our inspiration overseas. We find it right here, in our values and in our people,” he added, “[o]ur government will choose the Australian way because we are proud of who we are.”
Like Carney, Albanese is no right-winger. He was the man who introduced a referendum to Australia’s constitution recognizing indigenous Australians (a referendum that was soundly defeated in 2023). He’s a huge proponent of fighting climate change, and has globalist leaders in Europe including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, eagerly looking forward to future cooperation.
But leftist or not, Albanese still deemed it wise to use nationalist language in his victory speech.
It may still be too early to tell, but if these two elections suggest an emerging pattern, then we may very well be experiencing a shift in the Overton Window. Not so very long ago, Trudeau could get away with calling Canada a “post-national” state. Today, Carney can’t. That kind of shift would be a massive political victory. It’s one thing for a globalist to win elections while telling voters that the nation isn’t half as important as the global well-being. It’s a totally different thing for a globalist to win an election while telling voters that the nation is the most important thing.
There is a kind of poignant irony in that development.
READ MORE from Aubrey Harris: