A long-standing maxim in the newspaper business holds that the longer you spend as a journalist, the more jaded and cynical you become. As a high-profile columnist for national newspapers since 1985, most recently for the Globe and Mail, Andrew Coyne may have succumbed to this syndrome, judging by his new book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy.

In Global Battlefields, Walden Bello’s analytical rigor illuminates the trials that he and his allies confront. He notes that the new normal is polycrisis: an intersection of climate change, unrelenting capitalist expansion, increasing inequality between and within states, and the perpetual drive to imperial violence.

In a first-past-the-post system like Canada’s, it’s not unusual for the major parties to consolidate support in the run-up to an election. But in the bigger picture, the NDP—and the Canadian left more generally—seems to be at a loss for purpose in a political landscape that is suddenly oriented around threats from our southern neighbour.

Jack Layton was the first progressive politician who inspired me enough to go to a rally. He used to say optimism is better than despair. I think he was half right. Right now pessimism of the intellect says the Canadian left is in a bad place. But optimism of the will demands that if we have failed, we fail again, and fail better until we succeed.

In 1995 I moved to St. Petersburg and lived there for ten years. Although my antennas were always up for signals of a socialist spirit, or even just the memory of one, they registered none. My reaction was to dive deeper into the history of the 1917 revolution, and I began noticing things about it that were out of sync with my reading of Marx and Engels.

At Berkeley, while in his mid-40s, Michael Burawoy would deliver his talks wearing the same red shirt. He would walk briskly across the podium full of passion for what he was about to discuss. On his office door, he proudly displayed the logo that marked the relaunching of the South African Communist Party in 1990, a testament to his unwavering commitment to social change.

Marxism is in the throes of a great intellectual renewal worldwide reinforced by the ongoing capitalist crisis and the intellectual and political exhaustion of liberalism, neoliberalism, postmodernism and even cultural studies. But now in the face of the rise of China and the world capitalist crisis Marxism and Marxists are being forced to reconsider their own history.

We are nationalists, not in the sense that we want to keep Canada forever out of all future mergers of nations, but in the sense that we want to keep Canada out of the United States in the foreseeable future. We are nationalists because we believe that something new can be created here, and that something new might be a social democracy.

The alternative to Canadian nationalism is not a far-seeing policy of rational welfare on an international basis, but instead a gradual slide into satellite status, which will make it more and more difficult to solve even our problems of economic development with the full measure of freedom we require. The alternative is a policy of paralytic continentalism.

While Justin Trudeau abandoned his commitment to electoral reform all the way back in 2017, the issue has endured because Canadians understand that our voting system fails to accurately represent the will of voters. But this Trudeau failure is an opportunity for Jagmeet Singh and the NDP to become the outspoken champions of electoral reform.