Trudeau as Scapegoat Extraordinaire

Politicians of the West have been sucking on the corporate tit for too long. Now they must go back to work.

“2. Remember a leader is never cooked until people start to laugh at him.” Keith Davey was a key Liberal party strategist in the time PE Trudeau. He had ten rules for political survival, the above quote was the second. After the laughter Justin Trudeau becomes scapegoat for every thing that is wrong with the country, but really only a symptom of much larger issues.

They say we should never say never. I never thought I would write a blog defending Justin Trudeau. I have followed his political career from the outset. There have been a lot of unkind things said about him by many people over many years, myself included.

It is so easy to target people and turn them into scapegoats. We do so on a daily basis. When the shit hits the fan the first thing we do is look around for somebody to blame. It is so easy to dish out blame rather than take the long hard look identifying the real culprits and the pure evil they do.

I go so far as to say Western Civilization is suffering a pandemic of scapegoating. (We are also suffering from Stockholm Syndrome which is another topic for another time.)

We have been playing the game of scapegoating for too long and too often. We like to blame everybody for our problems instead of taking responsibility when they are so often self-inflicted.

Russia and China are too such scapegoats, and of course they serve a double function: We compulsively vilify them to justify endless wars, and endless militarism. Thus defining our societies in terms of fear, loathing, and hatred directed at concocted enemies. At the same time we internalize the violent behaviors we inflict on other nations, and then wonder why we become such violent bigoted societies.

As societies we become what we do.

We are very good at evading truth and taxes. Evading truth is the business of sleazy politicians and the media, evading taxes is the usual business of sleazy lawyers.

We are not only running some huge financial debt and deficits. We are also running huge moral, intellectual, and historic deficits.

In the scheme of things Mr. Trudeau is a minor functionary who has not played the game well. He was recruited as a neoliberal functionary. He had a party to rebuild, to work to establish and maintain “peace, order, and good government” and reclaim the country after a decade of Stephen Harper’s dismantling it .

Every politician inherits a political legacy from his predecessors; being dealt a good hand or a bad hand. Justin Trudeau was dealt a very bad hand and didn’t recognize how bad it was…and went about his frivolous neoliberal agenda.

His father was our last liberal prime minister. Brian Mulroney, as a protege of Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman — the neoliberal initiators, brought neoliberalism to Canada as it spread to every other Western country. All federal governments since, Liberal and Conservative, have been practitioners.

What was liberalism in the time of the father, has become contemptuous illiberalism in the time of the son.

To this day most Canadians and Americans are not aware of neoliberalism, as it is a stealth ideology carefully hidden from the public by politicians, the media and the public’s own political and historic illiteracy. Much has been written over many decades about neoliberalism by journalists and academics, but it is all relegated to the margins where it is banished from the political sphere.

It has often been said the decline of Western Civilization is a result of ruinous ideologies. Neoliberalism is just one among many operating simultaneously, including war, militarism, imperialism and neo-colonialism— all are fingers in the gloved hand that usurps democracy, and the public good is sacrificed to narrow vested interests.

Whether it is Trudeau in Ottawa, Biden in Washington, Scholz in Berlin, Stoltenberg in Brussels they are all functionaries serving the ideologies ruining the West. Where they claim to lead, they follow and perpetual warfare is at the top of their agenda.

In the last two years the Western media has once and for all revealed itself as no more than cheap propagandist as major news outlets publish and broadcast lies so easily exposed.

In Canada the languid MSM is government subsidized, too close to government and its closet apologist. Trudeau is mocked and ridiculed nationally and internationally. There are frequent occasions of open hostility when he appears in public. He has been re-constituted as the national scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the country, but he is only a symptom of the much larger crisis. The media refuses to address the fundamental issues that Canada’s democracy is broken and we are a casualty of neoliberalism like so many other Western countries. The country is in corporate capture which reigns supreme over government and media— it owns both.

The media wallows in the symptoms while refusing the name the disease. Where there is no honest diagnosis the malignancy worsens.

Trudeau clings to power as he knows he is not accountable to the public but to his corporate masters. They, not the public will decide his fate, no amount of public pressure will.

Trudeau has failed to effectively maintain the duplicity every Western politician must — appear to serve the public while serving the corporatist agenda-up to and including perpetual war. As they say in baseball he has made too many unforced errors—scandals, political clumsiness, ethical issues— to survive in his dual role as man of the people and neoliberal functionary.

Whether it is the NATO member states or the G7 all are dancing in the ruins of neoliberalism.

If we think electing new prime ministers , presidents or chancellors will solve the crisis of the West we deceive ourselves once again. Fifty years of perpetual war and neoliberalism have inflicted great damage on Western societies and the road back is there for the taking, no scapegoating allowed.

Politicians of the West have been sucking on the corporate tit for too long. Now they must go back to work.