Live by the revolt, die by the counter-revolt
Poilievre rode the anti-establishment wave and then got wiped out by a public craving calm
To understand what happened on April 28, start in 2022.
A “freedom convoy” clogged Ottawa streets, terrorized residents, and live-streamed its defiance. It started as truckers protesting everything from government-mandated vaccines to the federal government’s existence. Then non-trucker sympathizers, like gelato shop owners and Indigenous activists, swooped in with cash donations and copycat caravans. Even swastikas and Confederate flags came out in small numbers. These disparate groups had little in common, except their opposition to authority.
This was Martin Gurri’s hypothesis in action. In his book The Revolt of the Public, Gurri wrote that the Internet weakened the power of authority to uphold its legitimacy. With social media, the public is always connected and lampooning authority. Too diverse to unite around an idea to make things better, the public can only unite around the belief that authority is failing, like a freedom convoy united only in opposition.
Pierre Poilievre was born of Canada’s revolt of the public, counting on it for support. He defended the convoy on camera and attended to hand out Tim Hortons donuts to show whose side he was on. His most memorable slogans—axe the tax, get rid of the gatekeepers, defund the CBC—were subtractive, rather than additive. His thesis was that the “lost Liberal decade” was authority’s fault, resonating with the tear-it-down sympathizers, who repeated his slogans on Facebook and in encrypted group chats.
In came Mark Carney, typical of the authority the public had been revolting against: economist, banker, public servant, director of multinational corporate boards. His Liberal Party was the same one Canadians were ready to boot out of power just months earlier. He came with the same ministers, MPs, and advisors. He campaigned on a platform that was apparently developed before he became party leader, and which any recent Liberal Party could have released.
Yet now Carney is the prime minister by popular choice. So what happened?
Carney was born of a counter-revolt of the public. In Gurri’s model, the revolting public is bound by a politics of negation, rather than affirmation. It also emerges in a decentralized way, using the Internet and social media, while rejecting the cues of authority. Carney’s victory satisfied the first condition, but not the second.
Carney had negative appeal. He was the anti-Poilievre, promising continuity in everything but the flesh. Poilievre promised change yet was disliked. Canadians were getting wary after watching the American right’s politics of subtraction: the DOGE chainsaw to bureaucracy, defunding universities, ripping up trade agreements, and undermining the constitutional authority of judges and lawmakers. This brand of politics was being reinterpreted as more likely to spark a crisis than manage one. Though Carney also had positive appeal—a source of calm competence in the face of Trump—not Conservative was the mantra.
But Canadians didn’t counter-revolt the Gurri way. Instead of organizing peer-to-peer on the Internet, Canadians took cues from authority. They saw ads from political parties and groups with ties to them online. They relied on legacy news outlets like CBC and CNN to understand the stakes. They watched the leaders’ debates. They cast advance ballots in record numbers, even voting Poilievre out of his own riding. Restoration replaced rebellion, as the status of authority went up, and the status of anti-authority went down.
Given Canada’s return to authority, it’s tempting to think the Gurri hypothesis doesn’t apply here. We should hope it doesn’t. A connected public that is perpetually in revolt weakens authority until authority collapses. Liberal democracy is fragile enough to buckle under such intense and sustained opposition.
Pessimism is prudent. Though Canadians are less distrustful of authority on average, they are distrustful enough. The revolt of the Canadian public was real, descending on Ottawa’s downtown streets, and animating Poilievre’s brand of Conservative politics. And that public is still here. It is distributed among your friends and family. Your neighbours. It may even include you.
Carney will be tested by many crises, but if the Gurri hypothesis is right, the biggest crisis Carney will face is a crisis of confidence. Revolts have a way of rearing their ugly heads in exceptional times. Recall it was the Liberal government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis that triggered the last one. Such times call for exceptional measures, often without exception for the people who suffer the harshest unintended consequences along the way.
Our new prime minister will need to be the exceptional man he claims to be to steer Canada through the times ahead: a Trump-induced global recession and the decline of the global liberal order. Then again, even if he is, it’s no guarantee he’ll be a match for the public. Poilievre was, after all, until he wasn’t.
Very good piece. I think that people saw PP as Trump-lite and did indeed revolt against that. It is a good reflection of our collective IQ that we looked at a financial crisis and elected an experienced financier to manage it.