I’m a journalist in Edmonton, Canada, who covered former premier Jason Kenney’s rise through Alberta politics, in which he tapped into the populist zeitgeist of Donald Trump and Brexit, and his eventual implosion. I have a newsletter on Substack, "The Orchard," where I cover the intersection of politics, the media, and corporate power. Through my journalism, I’ve developed a keen interest in this age of mass discontent we find ourselves in, with right-wing political and economic elites promising to blow up the entire system they embody while feckless liberal politicians seek to tinker around the edges to make the established order more palatable.
In more than 30 years of public life, Jason Kenney played a pivotal role in bringing hard-right politics into the mainstream of Canadian public discourse, unleashing state and corporate power to entrench a rigid, hierarchical social order. As an anti-tax lobbyist with the Canadian Taxpayer Federation, a key player in establishing the Conservative Party of Canada, federal minister of citizenship and immigration, and then Alberta premier, Kenney successfully used populist rhetoric to promote policies that served fundamentally elitist ends.
But he ultimately couldn’t control the very populist forces he summoned to propel himself to power, providing a cautionary tale of political hubris. Through the story of the rise of fall of a key Canadian reactionary figure, Kenneyism outlines the contradictions inherent in modern conservatism.
True to its title, David Harvey provides a succinct yet rigorous outline of the predominant economic ideology of our age—neoliberalism.
Harvey explains how a consensus was forged in the late-1970s in favour of market-based solutions to all social ills, with political parties across the partisan divide accepting, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that the state no longer has a role to play in providing for its citizens.
He outlines how the rampant individualism and empty social relations ushered in by neoliberalism pave the way for the authoritarianism embodied by neoconservatism, with its emphasis on upholding a traditional moral order — through force if necessary.
Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Its spread has depended upon a reconstitution of state powers such that privatization, finance, and market processes are emphasized. State interventions in the economy are minimized, while the obligations of the state to provide for the welfare of its citizens are diminished. David Harvey, author of 'The New Imperialism' and 'The Condition of Postmodernity', here tells the political-economic story of…
Corey Robin takes the long view on the history of modern conservatism in this book. Outlining conservatism has constantly adapted in reaction to social progress since its inception in the wake of the French Revolution in the late-18th century, Robin identifies the goal of conservative politics as salvaging whatever it can of the old social order.
I found this book particularly useful in identifying how seemingly contradictory trends—such as a focus on reducing government spending while ramping up militarism abroad—can co-exist in conservative thought. This inherent flexibility reveals Donald Trump to be less an aberration than the next evolutionary phase for conservative politics.
Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them?
Tracing conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution, Robin argues that the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower…
In this book, Pankaj Mishraj describes how the failures of secular modernity led to the rise of revanchist movements seeking to provide those left behind with a common sense of purpose.
I greatly appreciated the international scope of Mishraj’s analysis, with which he reveals how the growth of reactionary, theocratic, and xenophobic populist politics across the globe are manifestations of the same sense of malaise.
He convincingly argues that these tensions are as old as modernity itself. Rather than engaging strictly with the same old historical and sociological sources to make his case, the author refreshingly engages the poets and novelists of the era he describes.
'The kind of vision the world needs right now...Pankaj Mishra shouldn't stop thinking' Christopher de Bellaigue, Financial Times
'This is the most astonishing, convincing, and disturbing book I've read in years' Joe Sacco
'Urgent, profound and extraordinarily timely' John Banville
How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American 'shooters' and ISIS to Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of…
Borders are far more than mere demarcations of territory, argues Canadian academic and activist Harsha Walia in a book I greatly appreciated for connecting seemingly disparate phenomena into a cohesive takedown of the modern state and its service of corporate power.
The conventional wisdom that corporate globalization eliminates national boundaries is only true, Walia explains, for an increasingly mobile global ruling class. For a global underclass of migrant labourers and asylum seekers, borders are increasingly entrenched, segregating newcomers as a source of cheap labour from the working class and fuelling the exploitation of both.
Walia describes how this segmentation undermines labour standards for all and fuels a xenophobic backlash against the depredations of global capitalism.
In Border and Rule, one of North America's foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation.
Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders…
I regard Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as the embodiment of an empty progressive politics that is far more concerned with style over substance.
Martin Lukacs does a great job in The Trudeau Formula of outlining how Trudeau’s combination of soaring rhetoric and tepid reform on issues like economic inequality, Indigenous reconciliation, and the climate crisis works to stave off the more systemic changes needed to address these concerns in a substantive way.
Lukacs aptly demonstrates how Trudeau serves to uphold the status quo while presenting himself as an agent of transformative change.
"The book is not a biography of Justin Trudeau, nor is it a treatment of the minutiae and manoeuvres of party politics. It is an investigation into how the Liberal government governs in the shadow of a silent, multi-decade corporate coup in Ottawa that dares not speak its name. It tells the hidden history of how the Liberal party has served as the most effective vehicle for implementing deeply unpopular neoliberal policies--and how Justin Trudeau continues this agenda today."--
I have been a writer for more than twenty years and have favored pursuing “truth in fiction” rather than “money in formula.” I also spent over thirty years in the corporate world and was exposed to many situations reminiscent of those described in my fiction and in these recommended books. While I support enterprise, “enlightened capitalism” is preferable to the bare-knuckle type we have today, and which seems to resurface whenever regulation weakens. I also find writing novels closer to my lived experience connects me intimately with readers who are looking for socio-political, realist literature.
Avery Mann, a retired pharmaceuticals executive, is in crisis.
His wife dies of cancer, his son’s marriage is on the rocks, his grandson is having a meltdown, and his good friend is a victim of the robocalls scandal that invades the Canadian federal election. Throw in a reckless fling with a former colleague, a fire that destroys his retirement property, and a rumour emerging that the drug he helped bring to market years ago may have been responsible for the death of his wife, and Avery’s life goes into freefall.
Does an octogenarian beekeeper living on Vancouver Island hold the key to Avery’s recovery, a man holding secrets that put lives in jeopardy? Avery races across the country to find out, with crooked bosses, politicians, and assassins on his tail. Joseph spins a cautionary tale of corporate and political greed that is endemic to our times.
Avery Mann, a retired pharmaceuticals executive, is in crisis. His wife dies of cancer, his son’s marriage is on the rocks, his grandson is having a meltdown, and his good friend is a victim of the robocalls scandal that invades the Canadian federal election.
Throw in a reckless fling with a former colleague, a fire that destroys his retirement property, and a rumour emerging that the drug he helped bring to market years ago may have been responsible for the death of his wife, and Avery’s life goes into freefall.
Does an octogenarian bee keeper living on Vancouver Island hold…
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