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The majority of voters have moved on from legacy media and legacy narratives

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From EnergyNow.ca

By Margareta Dovgal 

A Wake-Up Call for Political Strategists Across the Continent

For only the second time in US history, a president has lost, left office, and won re-election. For most Canadians watching the US election, the news of Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House comes with some degree of disappointment – and confusion.

Rather than getting caught up in doomsaying as there’s enough of that going around, I wanted to share some thoughts on what I would hope Canadians working in and around politics and policy come away with.

Speaking to the heart shouldn’t neglect speaking to the wallet

Biden probably should have resigned sooner, and Harris should have gone through a competitive primary race before carrying the flag. Hindsight is 20/20, and I doubt that the Democrats will make those same mistakes twice.

What I do suspect will be harder to shake is the commitment to running campaigns on social issues alone. The Democrats made the gamble that reproductive rights were a persuasive enough ballot box question to distract from Joe Biden’s lacklustre economic performance.

The clear majority of voters showed that they are more concerned with their job security, housing affordability, and tax bills.

The Democrats now have an opportunity to realign with the concerns of working Americans, recognizing that economic anxieties cannot be overlooked. A robust economic approach doesn’t preclude a moderate and fair social approach, but the latter can’t replace the former.

In Canada, this holds true for our discussions around energy and resources. I’m seeing a very similar disconnect play out on resource policy. Patently bad policies with horrible economic impacts are being advanced at all levels by governments more concerned with virtue signalling than ensuring robust economic performance – the federal Emissions Cap and the fantastical ambitions of David Eby’s CleanBC program among them.

Pre-pandemic, vibes-based economic policy seemed to work. In times of plenty, it is easy to persuade voters that taking economic hits is the right thing to do — after all, why worry about the price of something if you can afford it? Anyone still trying that in 2024 has lost the plot.

Affordability remains a paramount issue for many citizens, and the U.S. election highlighted how campaigns that overlook economic concerns and the declining quality of life risk alienating voters.

From groceries to gas prices, the rising cost of living is top of mind for Canadians, and resource policies must reflect this reality. For instance, a balanced approach to energy production can help keep costs reasonable while supporting Canadian jobs and industries.

It’s a reminder that beyond political credibility or mainstream appeal, policies that directly address financial challenges resonate most with the electorate.

For the resource sector, this means recognizing how affordable energy, resilient supply chains, and robust employment opportunities are interconnected with national policy priorities.

Truth and gatekeeping

The gamesmanship over who holds the authority to define “truth” continues in earnest, and engaging in it by discounting mass popular narratives is a risky gambit for any political movement that seeks to maintain widespread relevance.

We’re seeing a generational change, not just in the US but globally, on how people consume and produce media.

I would argue that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was the edge that Trump needed in this new era. Millions of Americans, and millions abroad, sought news and commentary from the platform. Political discourse on the 2024 election was shaped by the ideas generated and amplified online, faster than mainstream news could reliably pick up on.

Since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X, the editorial stance, algorithm, and tone of the platform have all shifted. Yes, it has gone ‘rightwards’, but rather than that serving to shrink the audience, it has instead grown, picking up swing voters and rallying the “persuadeds” more effectively.

Just look at the last debate between Trump and Harris: they weren’t even talking about the same political realities.

Research finds that as a main source of news, social media is still behind TV. Where we see the biggest difference is among younger voters.

46% of Americans 18-29 say social media is their top source of news, according to Pew Research. Beyond widespread appeal or readership, social media drives the political commentary of the chattering classes more than any one other platform. TikTok’s influence is likewise growing, with an even younger demographic relying on it almost entirely to help shape and articulate their views.

A similar dynamic around “truth” was plainly obvious in British Columbia’s provincial election last month. A good chunk of commentators couldn’t fathom that voters could accept a party that had refused to throw out candidates saying offensive or dubious things.

The BC Conservatives went from zero seats to just shy of government.

Enough ink has been spilled on this by other commentators, but let’s recap what many have said about the explanatory factors: BC United collapsed following its disastrous rebrand, the BC NDP was stuck with having to account with the inevitable baggage of incumbency in a struggling global economy, and the rise of Poilievre and the federal Conservatives lent some additional name-brand recognition to the BCCP.

The most important piece, in my estimation, was the Conservatives’ ability to tap into a growing demographic that didn’t feel their concerns were reflected in the mainstream political discourse. Twitter was far from the only forum for this, but I think it had a large part to play in cultivating the sense among many voters that consequential narratives were not even remotely being touched on in mainstream media. It gutted voters’ trust in the media, giving the BC Conservatives whose narratives were more effective on social media a decisive advantage.

Public safety is a great example of this. Anyone with eyes and ears who has spent time in Downtown Vancouver in recent years can attest to the visible decline, with visible drug use in public spaces, frequent run-ins with people with severe untreated mental illness yelling at phantoms, and unabashed property crime.

Yet, if we were to believe a great deal of commentators just up until the eve of the election, everything was just fine.

Willful blindness only works when people can’t comment on what they see. But comment they did, and the delayed response to it nearly cost the BC NDP the election.

In a purely practical sense, the increasing role of community-driven sources of information mean that gatekeepers can no longer control the flow of information. And let’s not mince words here: anyone concerned about misinformation is talking about gatekeeping.

Subjecting ideas out there in the commons to scrutiny is necessary. We just can’t take for granted that the outlets themselves will provide that editorial scrutiny directly, if it’s not baked in the platform by design and people are actively choosing to spend time on platforms that have a radical free speech mandate.

It’s time to accept that the train has left the station: persuasiveness needs to be redefined by the mainstream, rather than taking one loss after another and crying foul because the game has changed.

Canadian narratives for Canadian politics

Our closest neighbour and trading partner is the world’s largest economy, and Canadians can’t help but look south for news and ideas. Our own politics often mirror the messages we see in the US, and there’s no use trying to pretend that won’t keep happening.

If we want to avoid falling into the trap of inheriting the dysfunction and divisions that are increasingly defining the political system next door, we have a duty to develop compelling narratives that resonate with the unique needs of Canadians, across the political spectrum.

It’s the definition of insanity to keep trying the same things expecting a different result. Rather than directing anger at voters and political movements who have moved on from old media, if you’re not happy with the result, try meeting them where they are.

And no, this doesn’t mean ceding ground to conspiracy theorists or the fringe. They are only succeeding because a) they are speaking to issues that people decide they care about (like them or not) that are panned by the center and the left, and b) most crucially, there isn’t enough emotionally resonant, persuasive substance being put out to win hearts and minds.

These are not inevitable outcomes. Voter preferences and media technologies are constantly evolving. We need to evolve with them by subjecting our leaders to real scrutiny and demanding better.


Margareta Dovgal is Managing Director of Resource Works. Based in Vancouver, she holds a Master of Public Administration in Energy, Technology and Climate Policy from University College London. Beyond her regular advocacy on natural resources, environment, and economic policy, Margareta also leads our annual Indigenous Partnerships Success Showcase. She can be found on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Opinion

How Christianity Remade the World

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Tom Holland joins Bari Weiss on Honestly (The Free Press)

Interview courtesy of The Free Press

By Bari Weiss

This Christmas, one of our greatest living historians explains how one ‘radical message’ came to define the entirety of the Western world.

Is our vacation from religion coming to an end?

Whether you believe in the story of the virgin birth and resurrection, or you believe that those miracles are myths, one thing is beyond dispute: The story of Jesus and the message of Christianity is among the stickiest ideas the world has ever seen.

Within four centuries of Jesus’s death, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. It had 30 million followers—which amounted to half the empire. Today, two millennia later, Christianity is still the largest religion in the world, with more than 2 billion adherents.

How did the radical message of Christianity catch on? How did it change the world? And how does it shape all our lives today?

These questions motivate the latest episode of Honestly. My guest is the incredible historian Tom Holland, one of the most gifted storytellers in the world. His podcast, The Rest Is History, is among the most popular out there. Each week, he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, charm their way through history’s most interesting characters and sagas. I can’t recommend it more highly.

I also recommend Tom’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. In it, he argues that Christianity is the reason we have America, that it was the inspiration behind our revolution. He also argues that Christianity is the backbone of both “wokeness,” as an ideology, and liberalism, which so often sees itself as secular.

In today’s episode, Tom discusses all this and more, including a question that a lot of my colleagues have thought about this year: Is our vacation from religion coming to an end?

Click below to listen to the podcast, or scroll down for an edited transcript of our conversation. Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Tom Holland on How Christianity Remade the World

The Free Press

Episode

On the radical story of Jesus’s death:

Bari Weiss: Your book opens with the crucifixion. Your argument is that the turning point is not Jesus’s birth, but his death, at 33 years old, at the hands of the Roman authorities. Why is this the pivotal moment?

Tom Holland: It is very difficult to overemphasize how completely mad it was for everybody in the ancient world that someone who suffers crucifixion could in any way be the Messiah, let alone part of the one God. In the opinion of the Romans, crucifixion is the fate that should properly be visited on slaves. Not just because it is protracted and agonizing, but also because it is deeply humiliating.

When you die, you will hang there like a lump of meat. This is a demonstration, in the opinion of the Romans, that essentially their might is right. That if a slave rebels against his master, this is what happens.

I think what is radical about what Christians come to believe is not the fact that a man can become a god. Because for most people in the Mediterranean that is a given. What is radical is that the man Christians believe was divine was someone who had ended up suffering the worst fate imaginable—death by crucifixion—which, in the opinion of the Romans, was the fate visited on a slave.

The reason that Jesus suffers that fate is that he is part of a conquered people. He’s not even from Judea. He’s from Galilee. Galilee is not properly under the rule of the Romans. It’s franchised out to a client king. He is the lowest of the low. Even the Judeans look down on him.

The fact that such a person could conceivably be raised up by citizens of the Roman Empire as someone greater than Caesar himself, greater than Augustus, is a completely shocking maneuver. Judeans, Greeks, Romans—it’s shocking to them all.

The radical message of the crucifixion is that, in Christ’s own words, the last shall be first, and the first shall be last.

On the power relationship between the church and state:

BW: I’ve always been so interested in how Christianity goes from being the bane of the powerful to being the faith of the emperor. Constantine, the emperor who could have been a god, instead converts to the faith whose god died on a cross. How does that happen?

TH: Christianity spreads through most of the major cities of the empire. It’s not difficult to see what the appeal is. In a society without any hint of a welfare state, a state in which no value at all is put upon the weak or the poor or the sick, what the church offers is the first functioning welfare state.

If you are a widow or an orphan or in prison or hungry, the likelihood is that you will be able to find relief from the church. And that offers a kind of power because bishop literally means an overseer—the figure of a bishop who has charity to dispense. That’s quite something. You are in a position of authority that even your pagan neighbors might come to respect.

That’s the situation at the beginning of the fourth century, when Constantine is fighting a civil war. What Constantine wants is what Roman emperors for a century have wanted. Everyone in the empire knows that the prosperity of the empire is dependent on the favor of the gods. But there is a problem, which is that most cults are centered on particular temples, particular shrines, particular ways of offering up sacrifice or respect to a god.

Over the course of the third century, the Roman Empire goes through a terrible time—barbarian invasions, galloping inflation. So when Constantine comes to power, he is looking for a religion that can bind everyone within the empire. And this, basically, is what Christianity supplies him with.

What it also does is to suggest that there is a single celestial king in heaven. You can see it’s quite nice to imagine himself as the chosen one of God, because it suits his ego to have a single god for a single emperor.

But it has to be said that it takes Constantine and his heirs a while to realize what they’ve taken on—that the church is a kind of independent entity. And over the course of subsequent Christian history, what the relationship of the church should be to the authority and power of the great is one that is repeatedly being hammered out.

The traditions and ideologies of the Orthodox world and of the Western world are, I think, a consequence of the attempt to try and work out exactly what the balance should be between what you might call church and state.

On Christianity’s many paradoxes:

BW: To join a community not based on the lineage of your family or where you are born, but based on a belief—that still feels so radical to me, even in 2024.

TH: To the Romans, it’s bewildering. They are very puzzled. Who do the Christians think they are? They don’t have a land. They don’t have a mother city. Because they claim a universal identity, to the Romans, it seems they have no identity at all. This is a tension that runs throughout Christianity.

The paradox is the great motor of the Christian story and of Christian history. The idea that a man can be a god, the idea that someone who is dead can come to life, the idea that someone who suffers the death of a slave can be greater than Caesar: These are all paradoxes. And over the course of the 2,000 years of Christianity’s history, it’s unsurprising that these ideas have, in turn, generated further paradoxes, of which I would say—and this is pointed out by people hostile to Christianity—that for a people who claim to have a universal identity, Christians are very fond of fighting one another and denying the name of Christian to one another.

Christianity is a faith that is founded on the conviction that a crucified criminal suffering the death of a slave triumphs over the greatest empire on the face of the planet. That conviction has led to it becoming the most hegemonic explanation for who humans are—what their purpose on the face of the earth is, and where they will go after death—that has ever existed. And that gives it an unbelievable degree of power, and has given kings and emperors and popes power.

That is the supreme paradox of Christian history, a faith that became powerful by virtue of enshrining as its symbol someone utterly powerless. It’s incredible.

On the influence of Christianity on revolutions and modern political movements like wokeness:

BW: One of the things that Dominion does so powerfully is it shows the ways in which things we take for granted were actually Christian ideas. Some are obvious: the ideas of charity or forgiveness or redemption. But you connect even the American Revolution, the French Revolution to Christianity. You talk about how the impulses behind wokeness are fundamentally Christian.

TH: Christianity is inherently subversive of the established order that it’s born into. The Reformation of the eleventh century is followed by the Reformation of the sixteenth century, and that Reformation in turn is followed by the Enlightenment, revolutions, and the great cultural, ethical, moral convulsions that we’re going through at the moment.

You can distinguish certain abiding themes. One of them is the idea that the last shall be first—it’s the humbling of the papacy itself in the sixteenth century. It’s the overthrow of kings and emperors and czars in the American, the French, the Russian Revolution. It’s the toppling of statues in contemporary America, the idea that there is almost an inherent virtue within victimhood. To be oppressed is a source of power. It’s a very radical idea that Christianity weaponizes and has weaponized again and again and again.

I would go so far as to say that there are very few aspects of the culture wars that are being fought in America at the moment that do not ultimately have their origins in Christian theology. Like the trans issue. On one level, you would say that the idea that a man can become a woman or woman become a man, is radically opposed to Christian teaching. God creates man and woman separately in Genesis, and there really is no kind of sanction for thinking anything else. But at the same time, the case for trans rights as pushed by those who campaign for them is invariably done in very Christian terms. Trans people are defined as the last. And that seems to impose a kind of instinctive assumption that the last should become the first.

Martin Luther King Jr. described himself as an extremist for Jesus. His language, his speeches, his activism was saturated in biblical imagery. And essentially what he was doing was reminding Americans that if there is no Greek or Jew in Christ, then obviously there is no black or white. And he was summoning white American Christians to a reminder of their shared inheritance.

But over the course of the 1960s, there were other people, other groups of people who historically were disadvantaged, who drew on that lesson—whether feminists or gay-rights campaigners. You have a splintering between those who remain doctrinally Christian and those who are drawing on that Christian inheritance, but feel that they are opposing Christian doctrine and therefore increasingly become hostile to Christianity itself. The fact is they are indebted to the Christian inheritance. But because they have cut themselves off from the Scripture, the theology, the liturgy, and the patterns of behavior that had always defined Christians, they are kind of drifting off in all kinds of radical new ways.

But I think that there is one major theological maneuver that happens over the course of the ’60s, which is that sense that the Latin Christian doctrine of original sin is something to be profoundly rejected. The notion that human beings are born good and that they’re kind of corrupted by capitalism or whatever is very, very powerful in the ’60s. And so it seems liberating and progressive to get rid of the idea that we’re all born as sinners.

The problem with that is that if you get rid of the doctrine of original sin, then what you bake in is that it’s within our own capabilities to be good, to be a good person, and therefore you might persuade yourself that you are free of sin. By abolishing the concept of original sin, it encourages progressives to sit, in a more self-confident way, in moral judgment of those they oppose, than they might otherwise have done.

On why Tom returned to Christianity:

BW: You became secular as a teen and then you returned to Christianity. What brought you back to it?

TH: I exist in the kind of shadowlands between belief and agnosticism. And what brought me back from being an atheist apostate was that I found it boring ultimately. I found the process of reading the great Christian thinkers, reflecting on the patterns of Christian history, and recognizing that this is where I came from—they kind of gelled with me in a way that nothing else would.

There are times where I might be out in the wilderness and I have a sense of the closeness of animals and water and the sky. And I can imagine what it must have been like to exist in the Neolithic era. But I can’t go back to that, obviously. But I can go back to Christianity, because that’s the faith in which I was raised. And I think because of that, I am more open, perhaps, to its beauties as well as to its cruelties.

I feel that in trying to make sense of it, I’m trying to make sense of myself and the kind of conflicted nature that I sense exists within me and within the society that I live in. Ultimately, it makes my life more interesting to be a part of that, to share in that and to contemplate the possibility that it might be true.

BW: What does Christmas mean to you?

TH: The times of the year where I feel most Christian and I feel that I can believe most easily are Christmas and Easter, because these are the two great festivals of the Church. I respond to the inherent beauty and drama of the story. To live in England in December is to live in darkness a lot of the time, and so the idea of light in the darkness is very vivid for me.

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Bari Weiss is the founder and editor of The Free Press and host of the podcast Honestly. From 2017 to 2020 Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at The New York Times. Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet magazine.
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Bruce Dowbiggin

How The NFL Grinch Bought Xmas: Drowning In A Sea of Football

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After rummaging about for two months to no great effect the NHL has now embarked in its traditional Xmas break. Under the NHL’s collective agreement, no one plays any games from Dec. 24-27. This comes after a roster freeze that forbids trading a player during said holiday season. The annual World Junior champions, too, doesn’t crank it up till Boxing Day.

It’s a throwback to a more tranquil time when most of the Western world went home to eat too much and fall asleep on the sofa for three days. Then go shopping. So props to Gary Bettman’s NHL for keeping to their family stance. In such frenetic times there’s something to be said for pausing to sniff the frozen roses.

But catching your breath in the sports world is now an anachronism, driven by the massive dollars paid by networks and digital providers to sports leagues. In a time when the NFL rakes in $105 B ($2.1 billion a year) from its broadcast partners while the 32 teams collect a tidy $300 million each it’s no wonder the equity in NFL franchises has soared of  late.

And that means using every minute of the calendar to schedule games— especially on days like Christmas when hundreds of millions are sitting at home after opening the prezzies, itching for something to watch besides It’s A Wonderful Life. So the Xmas break this year features two games on the day and another on Boxing Day. Followed by a full weekend of games on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

In doing so it big foots the NCAA CFS’s new 12-team playoff and bowl-game format which also uses every day but Sunday this time of year. On the past Saturday FS games were given a head start before the NFL stole eyeballs with its own games an hour later. Tough luck college boys.  It’s unlikely to change as the CFS is eager to expand the playoffs in the future.

The NFL is not the first to exploit this previously virgin calendar break, of course. Th NBA broached the prohibition against Xmas Day in 1947, first placing a single high-profile game that day. Later it expanded to an all-day menu of games. Anything sacred about the family day went bye-bye as folks either went to the TV or the kitchen for the rest of the day.

The reason that pro sports is creating also many windows for their product is the sudden arrival of so many new outlets for games. Where legacy TV/ cable networks had exclusive dibs on buying rights for decades, cable cutting has now exploded the bidders. As GTM expert Rhys Dowbiggin told us in our July 29, 2024 column the model was UFC. Yup. UFC. “ESPN+ (Disney) has been working directly with the UFC for a number of year and packaging their events on the streamer. 

And let’s not ignore the monkey in the room: YouTube, which dominates all the streamers for eyeballs – YouTube (Google) has more live sports than any of the other streamers. Just for context, there is a massive amount of money in these deals: the recent NBA media rights deal is going to be 70B+ – split across a number of media partners. All the streamers took a similar GTM strategy – and they’ve led us back to 2001.”

Disgruntled consumers dumping cable/ satellite carriers sought other outlets for their spots viewing for NFL, NBA, NHL and NCAA. Leagues responded so we now have special placement games for YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple, Disney and Google. And the Xmas season cornucopia of games. Watching whatever you wanted. The strategy was to compete on bidding for original content to bring in the subscribers.

Then a funny thing happened. It was now only some of what you wanted. The expansion of carriers pissed off viewers just as much as the arbitrary cable companies. the magic solution of cable cutting is now the tragic solution. Explains Dowbiggin, “The original product fit for streaming was the promise of all the content you could need was in a single place, on-demand. You only needed Netflix (in a sense) and you never had to wait or choose what to watch.  Once the market fragmented into multiple players, the fit evaporated. Half the problem that was solved by streaming was now gone: 

Watching whatever you wanted. It was now only some of what you wanted.  The streamers GTM strategy was to compete on original content to bring in the subscribers. But creating content and not consolidating content exasperated the issue.”

The latest strategy is to bundle services across outlets to give consumers easier packaging. Says Dowbiggin, “Will bundling partnerships change things? It can’t hurt. But unless it drastically shrinks the numbers of players at the top to 2-3, the problem of ‘watching whatever you want’ won’t be solved, because I’ll still need Disney for my Star Wars. 

All I know is, I’ve kept my library card for years, because I always saw this coming. And I don’t plan on getting rid of it anytime soon.”

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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