Oh, Canada
We're starting the week asserting that democracy must stop Trump And we will end up the same way. It won't be easy, because now we know that Trumpism doesn't end with Trump or the extravagances and abuses of power of a rude and megalomaniacal president: Trumpism is a plan to establish an authoritarian order that functions internally, within the US, but also throughout the Western world. A plan designed to be hegemonic for many years to come. It is not a temporary threat, but a structural one with long-term implications.
The aim of Trumpism is to respond to Gramsci's famous phrase, which posed a challenge: "The old is not quite dead, and the new is not quite born." Well, the current American president, with his construction magnate logic taken to the extreme, and his entourage of ultraliberal young business school graduates (and the occasional self-loathing dandy like Vance) intend to finally extinguish the old world order and establish a new one. It is an enormous ambition, as is typical of totalitarian regimes. And it aligns well with some of the fellow travelers who share power with Trump at this moment in history, particularly Putin and Xi Jinping.
Trump went to Davos to further inflame and destabilize global politics with his usual repertoire of provocations and apparent delusions (there were several moments in his speech that were certainly incoherent). In any case, lest there be any doubt, Trump's rhetoric in Davos served to clarify that, for him, the enemy to be defeated is not Latin American drug cartels or theocratic governments like Iran's: it is Western democracies and the European Union. That is why, at this moment, the gestures and words of leaders who dare to stand up against the imperialist ambitions of the United States—a US that has ICE agents sowing panic among the population and that one day kidnaps the president of Venezuela and the next claims it wants to annex Greenland—are so valuable.
The Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney gave a particularly insightful presentation. At the same Davos Forum, he engaged in self-criticism while simultaneously confronting Trumpism. He pointed out the weaknesses and hypocrisies of the liberal order established after World War II (describing it as "a useful fiction") and, at the same time, called for "middle powers" (like Canada) to abandon the comforts this fiction has afforded them for over half a century and champion the construction of superpowers. Herein lies a good starting point for Europe: it is necessary to reorient the European Union as a "middle power" capable of forging solid alliances with democratic and reliable countries (Carney was keen to present Canada as such), dispensing with the mediation and tutelage of the US, seen as a malevolent Janus.