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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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Trudeau is a terrible politician and leader

Trudeau won the largest majority government in 30 years, 3 elections and on average posted better approval numbers than any American president since Bush (lol).

May the Canadian liberal party continue to be cursed with terrible politicians.

This just means that he was popular, not that the consequences of his policies are not terrible.

If American poasters think the consequences of his policies were terrible but Canadians kept re-electing him, there is the definite possibility that the consequences of his policies were not, in fact, terrible, at least for his first two terms.

I can't speak for Canada under Trudeau, but the two examples in the UK of a long-serving, historically successful, Prime Minister becoming catastrophically unpopular in their third term both involve the country being worse governed and not chickens coming home to roost from the honeymoon period. Thatcher did the Poll Tax, which was a genuine disaster. Blair did Iraq, which was unpopular in itself, but also became a distraction which prevented him continuing to push his ambitious domestic-policy agenda (which had been working in the first term - public services got visibly much better with only a small increase in spending). The "domestic policy" section of the wikipedia article on Blair's third term is entirely about counter-terrorist policy, which was also something which was less important than it looked and should have been delegated.

But the first two terms of both Thatcher and Blair were genuinely great times to be British. (Unless you were a union worker in one of the industries Thatcher stopped subsidising, I suppose). Thatcher's legacy was generally good - most of the damage of "Thatcherism" is about the next generation of right-wingers hanging on the ramblings of an increasingly demented elderly lady rather than doing the work of applying her insights to the circumstances of their (our) own generation. The worst parts of the legacy Blair left were not entirely his fault - the things that are most wrong with the UK post-GFC (not building enough houses, failure to diversify the economy away from business and professional services, not integrating or civilising the descendants of Mirpuri Pakistanis who immigrated in the 1960's) are all the working out of trends which predate Blair, although he enthusiastically allowed them to continue.