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To believe too much in anything is to fail in places. To believe in nothing (but yourself) is no safer. 

Western Liberalism is not the bomb we feared in the 1950s through the 1980s, but a new kind of bomb, one whose force is implosive, not explosive. Conditions are created to encase us in this new bomb's ever-liberating structure, one loosened not by ideology, but by identity; not by consensus, but by relativism.

The U.S. has told Canada to increase its NATO contribution to a minimum 2% of our GDP. If we do that, it will come at the expense of our welfare state. If we don't, NATO will take it in real estate (the Arctic) or tariff increases (on soft woods).

The question arises: Would you rather live securely in a dictatorship, or under threat in a liberal democracy? A false dichotomy, because there is nothing secure or unthreatening about life in a dictatorship, even a benevolent one, like Cuba's. 

Neoliberalism's greatest achievement is having us think we are living in a liberal democracy when in fact we are bound by its contradictions -- birds who have made our nests not with organic fibres, like those linked to the foods we eat, but with polymers made from fossil fuels.

"Nostalgia," according to Mad Men's Don Draper, "is delicate and potent." More recently, nostalgia gave us Brexit, and for America's whitest and blithest: Donald Trump. Before that, South Park's Memberberries, and before that, Robert Mugabe, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini ... 

"It's not called the Wheel," adds Draper in the middle of his pitch to Kodak, nor the Wheel of Fortune, but something closer to an axle; something like the Rack.