by Christo Aivalis
Less than two weeks ago, Justin Trudeau led a small parliamentary contingent from a distant third to majority government, overcoming an image of aloofness and style before substance. He stands poised to rule Canada for at least the next four years, carrying in the footsteps of his father Pierre, who stormed to victory nearly 50 years ago in a 1968 wave of Trudeaumania. Both father and son came about for similar reasons, namely that the public and punditry saw them as young, ambitious, and sexy arbiters of change. Indeed, both men have been sexualized in the media, sold as ‘pretty boys,’ after whom young women swoon.
While nearly every major news source has written comparative pieces of the two, I wish to focus on how both men, as per the Gramscian concept of passive revolution, were and are forces for the status quo. We can do this by examining their common motivations for reform, as well as the effect such manoeuvers had on the left and the New Democratic Party.
During their ascents to power, both Justin and Pierre emphasized the desire for new ideas and motivations that characterized the swinging 1960s and the post-crisis 2010s. In this desire to project change, Justin and Pierre combine both positive and negative rationales and language in their calls for reform. Continue reading