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Hello friends.
This IS a post about a Canadian former hockey player.
It’s NOT a post about beautiful boys kissing—except it is, a little bit, at the end. So stay tuned.
As we pass the one year mark of the second Trump presidency, what’s coming clearly into focus is not only the reign of terror at home, but the self-immolation of US standing in the world.
Jonathan Last in :
“We are witness to something rare in human history: Abdication by the leader of the global order.
We have seen empires fall and civilizations crumble. But we’ve almost never seen a people renounce their leadership of the world—all at once, in full public view.1 That is what has happened in the 365 days since January 20, 2025.”
Trumpism has abandoned US leadership in energy and technology, largely to China. And science, with no one fully stepping in.
Trumpism is threatening our economic hegemony, through the politicization of our monetary and banking system, instability and uncertainty, the tariffs, and through open systemic corruption including unregulated crypto scams. It’s hard to imagine, but we could lose our credit rating and status as the world’s reserve currency. We are already becoming a worse bet for global investors.
And Trumpism is of course turning its back on our leadership of other nations, our alliances, our humanitarian aid (causing potentially hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths around the world), our peacekeeping role.
Robert Kagan in The Atlantic:
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy made it official: The American-dominated liberal world order is over…United States has decided that it no longer wishes to play its historically unprecedented role of providing global security.
The American might that upheld the world order of the past 80 years will now be used instead to destroy it.
This world order is the only one I have ever known, the only one most people on Earth have ever known. I have enjoyed a beautiful, vibrant and secure life in the center of Empire.
It’s also a world order based on centuries of domination, violence, inequality and hypocrisy.
What many fear now is a world where only the hypocrisy is gone, and everything else is much worse.
One of my favorite quotes is by the French aphorist Francois de La Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.”
Without the willingness to pay that tribute, you get Steven Miller on CNN recently: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Which is rich, coming from this pathetic, weak, privileged, cowardly hatemonger who’s never faced real danger for one moment in his life, whose power comes from sucking up to terrible people. I think he’s unconsciously parroting Jack Nicholson’s speech in A Few Good Men, which came out when he was 7 years old: “We live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You?”
With cruel idiots like this in charge, the new world could, for sure, be a lot more dangerous and unstable.
Kagan again: “Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict.”
But it’s also at least possible that something else could emerge, alongside and in tension with this scenario.
Former hockey player Mark Carney, the current prime minister of Canada, gave a remarkable speech in front of Davos on January 20th. Remarkable for its candor, its clarity, and for an actually innovative and hopeful vision.
“Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality,” he said.
The pleasant fiction is that there was ever a rules-based order. There was, but only when it suited the United States. For eight decades we were the world’s policeman, and we put our knee on the neck of anyone who looked at us funny.
Carney: “…the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient…trade rules were enforced asymmetrically…international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
So there was peace—the kind of peace that comes after an abusive husband yells at the whole family to SHUT UP.
Now there is a different kind of power in play. In French, Carney said:
“la puissance des moins puissants commence par l’honnêteté.”
“the power of the less powerful starts with honesty.”
“La puissance,” not “le pouvoir.” I am not a French speaker, but I catch a vibe in the choice of the feminine noun.
Carney invoked Vaclav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless, an account of overcoming authoritarianism by “living the truth.”
That is clearly what is happening in Minneapolis, where a whole community is standing up and blowing the whistle, where there is something like a general strike today, something we haven't seen in America in modern memory.
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home and to act together.”
He talked about building a world based on shared values, and a combination of both self-reliance and strategic alliance. Collective investments in resilience for mutual benefit. Doubling down on the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules, but by true mutual agreement, not by force.
It’s ultimately the people’s job to keep politicians honest and make noise when they’re bullshitting. I know that when Carney says “strategic autonomy in energy,” it’s partially code for “tar sands pipeline.”
But the vision Carney has introduced, of a world with more equally distributed power, greater honesty and integrity, and even some re-localization of essential resources, appeals to me enormously. It feels like a step toward what Joanna Macy calls The Great Turning, actually.
Which gets me to the most important question of the moment: why do people—women, especially—love Heated Rivalry, the Canadian gay hockey romance?
writes that it’s an “anti-dystopian” show. Because what you are seeing is romance free of the domination dynamics of patriarchy.
In the grip of patriarchy, too often men and women enact toxic romantic dynamics that are very similar to what we accept in the global order: Surveillance. Disregard of boundaries. Economic dependence. Looming threat of physical force. Or simply the more casual, insidious assumption that the wealthier and more powerful entity is going to set the agenda, do the most talking, and direct what to do.
In “Heated Rivalry,” Rozanov and Hollander have their differences. They each have strengths and weaknesses. They compete fiercely on the ice, but it doesn’t cross over to their personal lives. It's love among equals.
What Heated Rivalry removes is not desire or dominance, but the structural conditions that allow domination to flow in one direction.
That lets us somatically experience a future beyond what exists now, a future we all actually want. Joy in the present makes joy in the future seem plausible. And that, too, is hope.
I wish you all some warmth and joy this weekend, despite the storms that surround us.
Come study and practice with me!
I’m offering a 5-week online program, February 26 – March 26, 2026, in line with my forthcoming book, to examine our collective emotional responses to the crises of our time and learn to find inspiration even in the depths of despair.
Explore your emotions with curiosity – building resilience and working with the energy within our bodies. The Institute for Jewish Spirituality has a number of wonderful offerings you can check out here; you don’t need to be Jewish to sign up!
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ICYMI :
I had so much fun chatting with and on Substack Live this week about making friends as an adult, inspired by this post:
Listen for how they complete each others’ De Tocqueville quotes. True #couplegoals.
