On January 20, 2017, women across the globe marched in resistance following President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The marches were symbols of protest, as a man with multiple sexual misconduct allegations against him had joined public office. As 2017 progressed, women began stepping forward, speaking up against misconduct, harassment, and rape, sparking an international movement, dubbed #MeToo. One year later, Canadian women reconvened to march on—to show their strength, to stand together. In Vancouver, even the tiniest of protesters raised their voices: Aria Brain, marching with her mother, sported a cape, the words “girl power” scrawled

Photo by the Canadian Press/Ryan Remiorz.

On a sunny Friday afternoon this past August, families—many of Haitian descent—began crossing through the Canadian border from Champlain, New York. Suitcases in hand, they started their trek to Canada in search of asylum—and a new home. Early this year, President Donald Trump threatened to end a program that granted Haitians temporary protection after their country’s devastating earthquake in 2010. The result was the mass arrival of hundreds into Canada, and in August alone, an estimated 6,000 asylum seekers crossed into Quebec. Hotels were not enough; Montreal’s Olympic Stadium became a temporary home for many. And while the number of border crossers appears to be slowing, the Canadian government still has plenty of work ahead.

There are many reasons why this limited vision is utterly failing to stop the surge of the far right around the world, but the main one is this: It does not have nearly enough to offer. It does nothing to address the real and legitimate grievances that supercharge the search for scapegoats, nor does it give the people most endangered by the rising right enough hope for a better future. A society with extreme inequality, unmasked neofascist tendencies, and an unraveling climate is sick, and neoliberalism, as one of the major drivers of all of these crises, is grossly inadequate medicine. It offers only a weak “no” to the forces responsible, and it lacks a “yes” worth seizing.

A great many of us are clearly ready for another approach: a captivating “yes” that lays out a plan for tangible improvements in daily life, unafraid of powerful words such as “redistribution” and “reparation,” and intent on challenging Western culture’s equation of a “good life” with ever-escalating creature comforts inside ever-more-isolated consumer cocoons, never mind what the planet can take or what actually leads to our deepest fulfillment.

And perhaps we should thank Donald Trump for this newfound ambition, at least in part. The shamelessness of his corporate coup has done a tremendous amount to make systemic change seem more necessary. If titans of American industry can eagerly line up behind this man, with all of his viciousness, venality, vanity, and vacuousness; if Wall Street can cheer on news of his plans to let the planet burn and the elderly starve; and if so much of the media can praise his cruise-missile strikes, ordered over chocolate cake, as “presidential,” well then, a great many people are coming to the conclusion that they want no part of a system like that. With this elevation of the basest of figures to the most exalted of positions, the culture of maximum extraction, of endless grabbing and disposing, has reached some kind of breaking point. Clearly, it is the culture itself that must be confronted now, and not policy by policy, but at the root.

What we have seen with insurgent left candidates and parties in the United States, Britain, Spain, France, and elsewhere are not perfect politicians or perfect platforms that have everything figured out. Some of the figures who have led these runs sound more like the past than the future, and the campaigns they have built often do not mirror the diverse countries they seek to govern, or at least not enough. And yet the very fact that these long-shot candidates and often brand-new political formations are coming within an arm’s reach of power—repeatedly stunning pollsters and establishment analysts—is proof of a very important fact, one that has been denied and suppressed for the many decades of neoliberalism’s stranglehold on public discourse: Progressive transformational change is popular—more so than many of us would have dared imagine as recently as just a year or two ago. In the many domains Trump does not control, we need to aim higher in our ambitions.

Here is what needs to be understood in our bones: The spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of evidence. What for decades was unsayable is now being said out loud by candidates who win millions of votes: free college tuition, double the minimum wage, 100 percent renewable energy as quickly as technology allows, demilitarize the police, prisons are no place for young people, refugees are welcome here, war makes us all less safe. And the crowds are roaring their agreement. With so much encouragement, who knows what’s next? Reparations for slavery and colonialism? A Marshall Plan to fight violence against women? Prison abolition? Democratic worker co-ops as the centerpiece of a green jobs program? An abandonment of “growth” as a measure of progress? Why not? The intellectual fencing that has constrained the progressive imagination for so long is lying twisted on the ground.

The left-wing almost-wins of the past two years are painful, but they are not defeats. They are the first tremors of a profound ideological realignment from which a progressive majority could well emerge—just as geopolitically significant as the rise of authoritarianism and neofascism on the right side of the spectrum. Indeed, the weaknesses and missteps of these left candidates should be a cause not for despair but for genuine hope. It means that a much larger political tent is possible—it’s just a matter of collectively, and carefully, planting the right poles from day one.

As many movement leaders are now arguing, a very good start would be accepting the premise that widening economic inequality and climate disaster are inseparable from systems that have always ranked human life based on race and gender, while the capacity to pit populations against each other based on skin colour, religious faith, and sexuality has been the single most potent tool for protecting and sustaining this lethal order. And if the political formation that has the guts to say all that also has a bold plan for humanizing and democratizing new technologies and global trade, then it would quickly seize back populist ground from the right, while feeling less like a blast from the past and more like a path to an exciting, never-before-attempted future. A deeply diverse and insistently forward-looking campaign like that could well prove unbeatable.

Excerpted from No Is Not Enough by Naomi Klein. Copyright © 2017 Naomi Klein. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Justin Trumpdeau. Photo courtesy of Twitter (@JustinTrumpdeau).

On July 1, President Donald Trump posted a tweet congratulating Canada on its 150th anniversary and referred to the prime minister as “my new found friend @JustinTrudeau.” This might seem odd, especially in light of recent disagreements between the two leaders over the Paris climate accord and Trump’s threats to ditch the 20-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But despite their differences it seems a summer bromance is in full bloom.

While not quite at the stage of strolling together through a flowery garden path along the ocean—as Trudeau did with French President Emanuel Macron in May—Trump’s tweet did hint to some serious sparks. Far from genuine closeness, what Twitter is calling #TrumpDeau is instead the product of a well-thought-out tactic to lull the erratic president into letting Canada sit on his good side—at least for a while.

Following through with his “America First” campaign battle cry, over the last few months Trump has repeatedly attacked the U.S.-Canada trade relationship, particularly on softwood lumber, dairy, and most recently, steel. In April, Trump threatened to pull out of NAFTA, calling it a “catastrophe.” He later backtracked and said he is willing to renegotiate (though he might change his mind once more if they can’t reach a deal that is “fair for all”). Trudeau has weathered these hurdles with grace, and has yet to appear too worried.

He put it quite simply in a public event hosted by the New York Times this June in Toronto, when Trudeau was interviewed by Times journalists Peter Baker and Canadian correspondent Catherine Porter. He loosely quoted a former prime minister—he couldn’t remember which one—likening Canada’s proximity to the U.S. to sleeping beside an elephant: “No matter how even-tempered the beast, you’re affected by every twitch and grunt.” (In fact, the man behind the famous quote was none other than his own father, the charming and much-loved former Pierre Trudeau, in whose steps our current PM seems destined to follow.)

This elephant is now far larger, grumpier, and prone to shuffle around than any of his predecessors. As the protectionist rumblings of the new American president are turned to the north, Canada seems to be facing a shakedown as the government carefully balances friend and foe.

The Trudeau administration has been preparing for these uncertain times since Trump was inaugurated in January. Nearly three-quarters of Canada’s exports head to the States, and the real threat of losing NAFTA has the administration switching strategies. “He decided to take a diplomatic approach,” says Baker, who credits the PM’s tactics. “He’s going to smooth over the differences as much as he possibly can, but that doesn’t mean he’s not finding ways to advance his own agenda.”

But what that agenda is, exactly, remains uncomfortably vague. In last month’s Times event, Trudeau was quick to admit the policy differences between the two. Yet when asked about NAFTA renegotiations he stuck to his reasoning that no leader in their right mind would call off such a lucrative trade agreement with so much at stake. When pressed further about his backup plan should the renegotiations in August go bad he insisted, “There’s no need for a plan B,” later saying he was 100 percent confident in the existence of NAFTA in a year’s time.

From a diplomacy perspective, being chummy with Trump isn’t a bad place to be, and so far Trudeau has scored a position with the president that other leaders have not (cue Macron awkwardly clamouring his way to Trump’s side for G20 family portrait). But despite the eagerness of the Canadian government to insist upon its importance to its southern neighbour, the U.S. just simply isn’t as reliant on trade with Canada. A recent study by the University of Calgary has shown that in only two states—Vermont and Michigan—trade with Canada contributes to more than 10 percent of its annual economic output. Canada’s provinces, on the other hand, are far more reliant, with 49 percent of Ontario’s GDP and 31 percent of Alberta’s GDP depending on U.S. trade. This has produced a lopsided trade relationship, putting Canada in a precarious spot.

But Trump is not like any other United States president. Trudeau himself labelled the president a businessman and a dealmaker. “He knows how to interact socially on a very effective level,” he said, acknowledging that Ottawa has had to react likewise. “We realized we had to get connected with the folks who were coming in to government for the next four years.” Trudeau’s government has wisely noted Trump’s considerable value in personal relationships—he’s the kind of guy where a strong handshake goes a long way in his decision-making process. So how does one approach trade with businessman? Baker says it seems the prime minister has calculated that personal chemistry and connections matter to the new president. “While they’re going to disagree, he’s not going to do it in a way that makes President Trump angry or hostile in a direct way,” he says. “He thinks that will benefit Canada.”

Trudeau has made it clear that he believes any attempt to stiffen the border will negatively impact both sides of the deal, and in what Times columnist Max Fisher described as a “donut strategy,” Trudeau has enlisted multiple layers of government to go around him. Canadian officials are appealing directly to American mayors, governors, and small businesses to establish relations outside the boundaries of the White House—a move that Barker describes as successful. “Where Trump and he don’t agree he’s going to find other partners in America,” says Baker. “That’s clearly a way for him to avoid open conflict with the president, but in the end a president matters and he’s going to find a way to manage that relationship.”

Mimicking Trump’s own political strategy, the prime minister has used personal connections and past political ties to solidify a holistic working relationship with separate states. Former Canadian PM Brian Mulroney—who has personal connections to many U.S. officials, including Trumps commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross—was called back from retirement to act as Trudeau’s unofficial advisor. Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has been in communication with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, building ties against more “buy American” efforts, while other premiers are apparently making similar connections to cultivate access.

So what will happen if renegotiations go sour? If the deal is scrapped, it’s likely Canada and the U.S. will go back to a similar version of the previous U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, or draft a new one altogether. In this event, things are likely to get messy with support for NAFTA divided across the United States. Millions of jobs rely on the free trade pact, especially in midwestern states where agriculture producers rely on exports to Mexico and therefore have more to lose, according to the Midwest media group Harvest Public Media. 

As the summer draws to an anxious end, Canadians are forced to trust Trudeau and his government in their noble quest to secure a sturdy personal and trade relationship with the U.S. president. Undeterred by the unstable ground he seems to be standing on, Trudeau continues to hold his head. “What I’ve found from this president is that he will listen to arguments,” he said. “And that’s something we can definitely work with.”

If you say so, Prime Minister. Over to you. 

Photo by Javid Suleman.

In January, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that restricted immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days, stopped refugee admission for 120 days, and banned all Syrian refugees indefinitely. Days later, a federal judge blocked the ban. That didn’t stop Trump, who unveiled a revised ban in March that continued to prevent immigration from six of the seven countries; two more federal judges have since blocked parts of it.

As the situation continues to unfold, many are calling on the Canadian government to suspend a U.S.-Canada pact called the Safe Third Country Agreement, which stops refugees who arrived in the U.S. first from claiming status in Canada, and vice versa. Zool Suleman, a Vancouver-based immigration, refugee, and citizenship lawyer and advocate against racial profiling and Islamophobia, explains.

Was the Safe Third Country Agreement ever an issue before Trump’s executive order?

There have been studies that show Canada’s immigration and refugee system is much more generous than America’s, that our system allows for much more due process and justice rights, and that our definitions of social groups and refugee conventions are broader. The effect of the agreement was that those who arrived in America first were disadvantaged in the type of refugee claims they could make. So, there was some disquiet before the latest presidential changes in the U.S., but there wasn’t any large galvanized movement.

Do you think Canada should change the agreement?

I think Canada should definitely consider suspending the agreement until it has verifiable guarantees from the U.S. that refugees will get full and fair hearings, access to legal counsel, it will not detail children, it will not separate families. It’s not to say to America that there should never be a Safe Third Country Agreement; it is to say that the current conditions of asylum processing in America are of concern to Canada, and therefore Canada wants to be sure that those individuals who make claims in America and are barred from making claims in Canada, are receiving a full, fair hearing with all of the procedural and legal safeguards that are necessary.

Do you see that suspension happening in the near future?

I am doubtful, because I think the current American administration can be vengeful, and Canada is aware of the economic consequences of seeking a suspension.

What else could Canada be doing to improve the situation?

Canada could take a more liberal view of the exemptions to the agreement. So for instance, if there are individuals who aren’t minors or don’t have family in Canada that perhaps fit into a more a needy exemption—they’re escaping from torture, or they’re escaping from certain kinds of abuse, or they’re escaping or seeking asylum from predominantly Muslim majority countries. Canada could set up additional categories of exemptions. But of course, it would need American co-operation.

Have you been hearing from people in the U.S. looking to come here?

Yes. I would suggest most established refugee and immigration law practitioners have been getting a significant increase in inquiries, but they fall into different groupings. There are people who are in America for a short time, who perhaps initiated a refugee claim, but after the change in administration, fear they will not get a fair hearing. There is a second group that has made refugee claims, has not been successful, and are not feeling like they will get a fair immigration processing. There’s also a group who are undocumented in the sense that they’ve lived there for a very long time and might have American family members, but are feeling like they cannot count on a fair system for immigration determination. These are nationals from Mexico, Central America, India, Asia. We’re seeing more and more of those people, who the Trump administration refers to as the illegal immigrants. That group would be blocked because they would have been in America for a long time.

How big of a role do you think public opinion plays here?

I think the government of the day can help form public opinion, but I don’t think it can overcome public opinion. I am becoming concerned by the number of polls that seem to suggest that Canadians are hitting a point where their generosity is feeling overextended. The government should be having a conversation with Canadians rather than projecting that it is some kind of leader in refugee and immigrant protection, but then not being able to follow through.

What do you think is driving those concerns?

We can’t discount issues of Islamophobia and race. There’s also a sense that to share means there’s less. And a lot of people are too scared about their day-today economic security to get into that dialogue.

CORRECTION: The previous headline for this story incorrectly referred to the Safe Third Country Agreement as the Third Safe Country Agreement. This regrets the error.

President Donald Trump’s Twitter photo.

Two years ago, some friends and I started our own private chat room on a service called Slack to talk about baseball. We did it because our non-baseball-loving friends on Twitter were tired of us yammering about bat flips and Moneyball and Troy Tulowitzki. I can’t overstate how well used this chat room is. We are in there every day and most of us keep a running conversation going during each Toronto Blue Jays game. We also use it to share baseball ephemera—weird facts, stats, articles, and photos. Recently, someone posted an old baseball card with Bill Murray on it. This sent us off on a chase to figure out why such a card even exists. It’s the sort of exercise that the internet is great for, and we gleefully threw ourselves down every rabbit hole we could find to learn about Bill Murray (who, it turns out, has been accused of some pretty horrible things and is probably an asshole), the history of baseball in Utah, and the many tendrils of minor- and indie-league stories from around North America. All told, we killed about two hours and seriously debated pooling $100 to buy a copy of the card on eBay.

Most of the rest of the time I spend online isn’t this much fun, by which I mean it is mostly terrible. It’s easy to be cynical about the web these days, because it can feel so far from what it was supposed to be. The “Information Superhighway” was going to open up the free exchange of ideas. It would set knowledge free and reinvigorate public debate.

Instead we got fake news and racist cartoon Pepe frogs and Donald Trump. Ezra Levant’s right-wing Rebel Media generates hundreds of thousands of YouTube views spreading hate and disinformation. A handful of Conservative leadership candidates slyly court the worst kind of people through dog-whistle memes. We built a global network of information and communication, then neglected to give it any substance.

I’ve been writing about technology and culture for two decades. I’ve never been an enthusiastic cheerleader, but I was always optimistic. I liked what the internet was doing for the world. But then came anonymous online forum 4chan and photos snapped of unsuspecting women called “creepshots” and a seemingly endless barrage of awful people who turned Levant, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos into rich internet “stars.” Over the last year, the columns I’ve written in these pages have been about how Facebook is bad for news and Twitter is bad for discourse and Uber is bad for everybody. The year before that I wrote about photos of dead people invading social networks and sexism on Wikipedia and, before that, 800 words under the headline “#Hate.”

I say this with all the irony my white male privilege can muster, but I’m tired. Maybe we made a mistake.

Were people always this awful, and the web has just dragged them out from under their rocks? In the free exchange of ideas, do the loud, bad ones win out just because they are loud and bad? If “the medium is the message,” as Marshall McLuhan posited, the message is that decent people should go back to reading books and sending letters.

Or maybe this is the cost of knowledge: Some ideas are bad. Some people are shitty. But sometimes someone posts an old baseball card and you and your friends can spend a couple hours digging up scoresheets from Pioneer League baseball games, or whatever floats your particular boat. We built a global network of information and communication, and it’s our greatest invention. Sure, sometimes it means we need to have tedious discussions about the value of punching Nazis in the head, but it also means I get to talk about baseball. It means my mother gets to watch her grandchildren grow up in real time from the other side of the country. We have a modern Library of Alexandria and an endless archive of video and audio. We are connected to everyone we’ve ever met.

The web is still relatively young and finding its legs. I’m going to try to be optimistic that the best is yet to come and that perfect utopia still awaits. After all, it took television more than half a century to produce The Wire.

Last weekend, Washington, D.C. was the locus of celebrations marking the transfer of presidential power from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. The traditional ceremonies—from the swearing-in and the inaugural parade along Pennsylvania Avenue to the plethora of balls and galas—coincided with events such as the “Deploraball,” organized by members of the racist, sexist, far-right coalition that calls itself the “alt-right” and that threw its wholehearted support behind Trump. Hats bearing the slogan “Make America Great Again” were a common sight throughout the city, as were blue scarves bearing the name “Trump” in white at each end.

In addition to those grim scenes, the city also played host to myriad protests running the gamut in terms of size, politics, and tactics. A few hundred people gathered to protest the Deploraball on Thursday night, lining up opposite police who used chemical spray on them throughout the evening. There was a sizeable anti-fascist contingent there and at protests the next day; more than a few “Antifaschistiche Aktion” flags, as well as those of various socialist and even communist organizations, could be seen rippling in the breeze throughout the weekend.

A sign at the protest outside the “Deploraball.”

One Trump supporter got into a skirmish with antifa protesters at the Deploraball, instantly drawing a huge crowd of cameras and reporters. It was a fitting prelude to the punch seen ‘round the world, when alt-right leader Richard Spencer—who, despite claiming not to be a neo-Nazi, supports a white ethno-state, has advocated forced sterilization and yelled “Hail Trump” at a conference in late 2016, leading several attendees to do the Nazi salute—was hit in the ear by a masked protester on Friday. Debates are now ongoing regarding the ethics of punching fascists, but if the goal is to stop them from feeling comfortable parading their ideology in public, it appears to have done its job.

On Inauguration Day, several groups, from Black Lives Matter to NoDAPL anti-pipeline activists, formed blockades at checkpoints along the inaugural parade’s route and attempted—in many cases successfully—to prevent Trump supporters from getting through. The anti-war and anti-racist ANSWER Coalition convened as early as 6 a.m. to get protesters onto the parade route. A number of marches converged at McPherson Square for a rally. A group of black bloc protesters engaged in limited property destruction of corporate windows, MAGA hats and, most memorably, an empty limousine; the response from police was aggressive. Flash-bang grenades and chemical irritants were deployed liberally. A group of 222 protesters, legal observers, journalists, and bystanders were kettled and detained, according to the National Lawyers Guild. They are being charged with felony riot, which carries a possible 10-year sentence.

Police line up around a group of detained protesters.

The Women’s March on Washington, the most-publicized protest, drew more than half a million people as well as huge crowds to “sister marches,” with a low estimate counting around 3.6 million in attendance globally on January 21. Easily the largest demonstration of the weekend, the women’s march was also the least overtly political. Many attendees seemed focused on general messages of gender equality and supporting women’s rights without necessarily having considered how best to do that, or what that might mean for women with various intersecting identities. Pink “pussy hats” were everywhere, as were signs that promoted a strictly cisnormative idea of womanhood, and messages from white women thanking police for keeping the peace at the protest pointed to a failure on their part to understand the antagonistic role police play in many women’s lives and in the protests that happened less than 24 hours prior.

It’s unclear if the oppositional energy on display will be effectively harnessed by organizations prepared to push legislators, elect their own candidates and provide alternative means for survival in the meantime, but there are promising signs. The Democratic Socialists of America, billed as the States’ largest socialist organization, has seen its membership skyrocket, and a call-in campaign early in the year led the Republican Party to reverse its decision to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics.

***

What can we in Canada take from the D.C. protests? Aside from the fuzzy feeling of attending one of the various women’s marches across our fair country, there must be something from this moment of great unrest we can apply to our own political circumstances.

At an event held by Jacobin magazine on January 20 in D.C. titled the “Anti-Inauguration,” journalist Anand Gopal stressed the importance of resisting not just Trump, but “the system that makes Trump possible.” In other words, the failed economic policies that have decimated unions, encouraged stratospheric wealth inequality, promoted corporate gluttony at the expense of the climate and of workers; a foreign policy that patrols other countries with unmanned execution robots, that spies on foreigners and citizens alike, that eats up trillions of dollars without making anyone in the world safer; domestic approaches to policing and housing that disproportionately affect racialized and particularly Black people; and a nightmarish immigration policy that sees families broken up or held in detention.

These are aspects of the dominant agenda of both political parties in the U.S., and as the speakers last Friday night noted, this agenda has failed people to such a degree that they have by and large abandoned hope in the political process. In 2016, as barely half of all eligible American voters cast a ballot, just enough in the right states latched onto a destructive strongman whose promises to help are empty but whose threats to hurt are already being fulfilled.

That agenda exists in Canada as well. As with most comparisons between the two countries, it warrants saying that the situation here is less stark in most cases. Canada fought in Afghanistan but not Iraq; we are part of the Five Eyes spy alliance, but didn’t mastermind the NSA’s intrusion into lives all over the world. We have health care, and a social safety net, even if they’re underfunded. The wealthiest one percent of Canadians took in 10.3 percent of all income in 2013, according to Statistics Canada, while economist Emmanuel Saez calculates that the top one percent of American families took in 58 percent of all income from 2008 to 2014.

But Trudeau’s plans for the “middle class and those working hard to enter it,” his pet phrase for the Canadians deserving of the government’s help, are smoke and mirrors. His party appears to understand that people are unhappy with the existing political order, and are expressing such in the votes for Brexit and Trump, but so far they are unwilling to distance themselves from it in anything other than rhetoric.

We saw a huge presence in Canadian cities on January 21 to protest Trump’s inauguration, but there hasn’t been nearly the same response nationwide to the neoliberal agenda put forth in our country. It’s true that Trump presents a unique and immediate threat to the U.S. and the world, through embracing disastrous environmental practices and the fear of an international conflict instigated by his erratic and bombastic behaviour. He is a uniquely hideous figure in almost every possible understanding of the word. His long and storied history of sexual misconduct, which includes several allegations of assault and harassment and him bragging on tape about assaulting women, certainly provided a focus of protest for women who may not otherwise be drawn to politics.

Heeding Gopal’s words means understanding that the same conditions exist to create widespread malaise and dissatisfaction in Canada. They’re not as advanced, to be sure, but we already have a test of our liberal democratic values on the horizon: Kellie Leitch and her advisors have made the calculation that the best way to win the Conservative nomination is to adopt anti-immigrant xenophobia like Trump. Bizarrely, she’s even begun to tweet like him. Whether her attempt at rabble-rousing will succeed is another matter; it seems unlikely without at least a patina of economic populism and charm, both elements she’s lacking.

Canada is not yet at the point America reached before it elected Trump, but we would be wise to be aware of what might lie ahead. The tide appears to be turning in one country after another away from the neoliberal order, and at present, the far right is the only group in most countries offering anything remotely appealing to the average working person. Now is the time for the left to throw itself into resistance, organizing and offering a full and positive alternative to the politics of austerity and division. An alternative that includes the entire working class, that sees identity and class as a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” proposition. We are in a moment of flux, one in which Friedrich Engel’s call to “transition to socialism or [regress] into barbarism” rings truer than it has in decades. One advantage in Canada is that, if the left is able to rise to the occasion now, we might do so before electing our own barbarian.

On the morning of the U.S. election last November, I logged onto Twitter and spent several hours arguing about privilege—mostly white, but also male—with someone who believed the entire concept was, itself, racist and sexist because he “judges people individually,” systemic issues be damned. As often happens, the discussion devolved to me calling him “willfully obtuse” and 20 minutes later, “fucking stupid.” I’m not terrific at debating, but I am fairly certain of two things: privilege is real and nobody has ever been convinced of that on Twitter, even without name calling.

We all know how that day ended: with the the unfathomable, terrifying, and depressing culmination of a campaign that saw a brick heaved through the Overton window, followed by a molotov cocktail and several bags of dog shit. On November 9, several tech companies woke up wondering just what role they played in getting a neophyte demagogue elected to the office of President of the United States. Twitter, for its part, finally had to take a hard look at its service and its contribution to public discourse.

Its approach up to that point was mostly to avoid the question. Sure, they locked out “alt-right”¹ nihilist haircut Milo Yiannopoulos, but the cesspool of humanity he controlled just kept on keeping on in their unceasing war against “cuckservatives” and “libtards” alike. After the election, Twitter admitted its staff were having “challenges keeping up with and curbing abusive conduct,” added new controls for shielding oneself from such conduct (really, just a slightly more sophisticated version of the Twitter mute button), and started shutting down some of the more egregious “alt-right”² accounts. Delightfully, this caused several terrible people, such as actor-turned-racistuncle-to-the-entire-internet James Woods, to leave in a “free-speech” huff. But former “Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” David Duke still gets to tweet, so let’s call the effort inconsistent at best.

Twitter is motivated to try and fix things. Last fall there were rumours that the company could be bought by Google or Disney or Salesforce or Microsoft, but nothing ever came of it. Which is fair—who wants to assume that much liability? Meanwhile, its problems seem like a more focused version of the web at large, where newspapers are shutting down comment sections and at least one major advertising network is pulling its service from sites such as Breitbart.

It’s getting easy to start thinking that maybe the entire internet was a terrible idea, and Twitter encapsulates that perfectly. The things that make Twitter fun and addictive—It’s instant! It’s pithy!—also strip complex subjects of any kind of nuance. Twitter rewards snark, invective, and cynicism, lighting up your brain like a slot machine every time someone clicks “favourite” or “retweets” you. More than anything, Twitter feels like all of the loudest people—including me—yelling at each other. Sometimes in agreement, sometimes in disagreement, but always, always yelling.

Could I be a better at debating issues with people on the Internet? Sure. It would just take a little patience, some empathy and a concerted effort to fight every instinct I have while scrolling my feed. But even then, I’m not sure I could convince the willfully obtuse or the fucking stupid that systemic racism and sexism actually exist.

Twitter, for all the time I spend on it—and genuinely enjoy it—just might not have the gestell for grown ups to talk about grown-up things. I suppose that’s why someone like Donald Trump enjoys it so much.

1 The “alt-right” is a big tent of awful people, including racists, misogynists and other assholes. Yiannopoulos’s specific brand of altright is the narcissistic pseudo-intellectual who gives the appearance of wanting to watch the world burn, but is really too shallow to care about much beyond their own microfame among white guys with bad opinions about ethics in video game journalism.

2 Real, actual, literal Nazis.

https://twitter.com/BarackObama

American politics have always been of serious interest for Canadians. Not only does the American President affect Canadian politics and procedures, but American elections are also just a heck of a lot more interesting to watch than our own. There’s something incredibly exciting about sitting around with your friends and watching the votes come in, as Wolf Blitzer and his associates furiously tap screens that zoom in and out on the states (CNN went very high-tech this year). Last night’s Barack Obama vs. Mitt Romney battle was no exception—and as always, in and amongst the surging patriotism and mountains of hope, there was absurdity. Here, we bring you some of the election’s biggest WTFs.

1.)  Mitt Romney, on election day, tells reporters he only wrote a victory speech. That worked out well.

2.)  Mitt Romney takes forever to concede, finally addressing the public early this morning. He was scrambling to write his defeat speech, okay?

3.)  Donald Trump calls for a revolution when Obama wins. Tweeting things like, “We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” and, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!” business mogul Trump made it pretty clear that he was upset with the night’s results. Some tweets were deleted, including the outrageous, “More votes equals a loss…revolution!” Trump’s strong dislike for Obama is no secret (remember when he insisted that the President wasn’t American?), but this is ridiculous. What exactly is Trump hoping to gain? Being upset with the election’s outcome is one thing; deciding that it’s proof of an unjust system (and thus cause for revolution) is entirely another. At least NBC’s Brian Williams commented on its preposterousness.

4.)  Karl Rove says calling Obama’s victory in Ohio is premature. Even as CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, and even the Conservative Fox News said the state was Obama’s, Romney advisor Rove said, in an interview with Fox, that with 991 (20 percent) of the state’s votes still uncounted, it was too soon to know. This caused anchor Megyn Kelly to address the network’s number crunchers directly and find out if they, given Rove’s assessment, stood by their projection. They did. And, turns out, they were right. Woo!

5.)  Richard Noyes alleges that the liberal media was biased against Romney. The Media Research Centre’s Research Director Noyes wrote an editorial, published today by Fox News, which listed five reasons why this supposed bias was a major cause in Romney’s loss. Among them were accusations that the liberal media defended biased debate moderators (who were in favour of Obama), tried to hide the truth about America’s poor economy, and attacked “Republicans as liars for statements that were accurate.” If I’ve learned one thing in journalism school, it’s that no media establishment is completely without bias—it’s literally impossible to be 100 percent neutral, in any circumstance—and that goes for both political camps. Also, Noyes should give America more credit than that: it’s a smart country, and its people can tell when they’re being fed nonsense. Plus, the media is an overly used and very easy target when pointing the finger. Why is only the liberal media to blame?

6.)  Ann Coulter is…still Ann Coulter. A sore loser, the Conservative writer tweeted: “The good news is the promise of continued massive unemployment among young people.” Ugh.

7.)  People think Justin Bieber is American and urge him to vote. This caused the Canadian (HUZZAH!) pop prince to take to Twitter, saying, “im 18…but i cant vote…im Canadian.” Sorry to crush the hearts of 14-year-old girls everywhere else, but he’s ours.

8.)  Obama beats Justin Bieber for the most retweeted post on Twitter of all time. Shattering Bieber’s record of over 220,000, Obama’s “Four more years.” tweet (featuring a heartwarming photo of Mr. and Mrs. Obama in a sweet embrace) has been retweeted over 680,000 times. Confession: this is actually a total FTW. Obama FTW!