Of responding to MAGA…
I have made much of the contest between myself and Claude in all this. I’ve said little of the contest between Carney and Trump, that has been the subject matter of the contest.
The speech came at a time when politicians feel no longer the need to do much speechifying, and the most powerful politician of them all now indulges himself in incoherent vaudeville shtick. It came from a wonk entrenched in the rules-based order and its neoliberal pieties, running a country long taken for granted as nice, succeeding a charismatic movie star of a leader. Canada was angry at what was coming at it from south of the border. But this articulation of it was a thunderbolt. Especially given who it came from, and how it was framed. And even if Carney does not end up following it through, as cynics grouse, and even if it was worded the way a central-bank governor would word it — it was a speech for the ages.
It has been strange to survey the wonkish, clichéd, crabbed words of Carney up close, and how they contrast with the grandiose Demosthenic garb we’ve fashioned for them; because the diction was not what made this speech as portentous as it was. The moment and the intent and the anger of it did. In spite of the wording, not because of it. And the moment and intent and anger of it were what came through in the public consciousness.
Recasting the speech into something an antick Athenian could make sense of has had to dial up that intent, and dial down that wonkishness. I do not say that what we wrought here is a greater speech than what Carney delivered at Davos, or even merely that it was a more sonorous speech. I will say, his speech deserves the memorialisation.
…and to AI
And AI too is a disruptor like MAGA is, upending all that we knew and held dear. A lot of it will make the world a worse place, in ways we bags of mostly water dare not formulate. I hope that it will not all be for worse, and I have proven to my own satisfaction here that good will come of it, too.
Just as Carney hopes will come out of the rupture he has responded to, on behalf of all those states holding some middling power: But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together.