Trudeau, Perry and the Fall of Performative Liberalism
The 2010s promised the good guys had won: Trudeau had the socks, Perry had the shark and liberalism had never looked better. The problem with liberalism was never sincerity nor substance, it is the belief that making a political statement is the same as making change. One decade, one housing crisis, one rocket launch and one Coachella later, Natasha Ng writes on how the next face of liberal hope in North America emerges while the last couple of liberalism falls.
In April 2025, Katy Perry floated weightlessly on Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rocket launched from west Texas, tears streaming down her face, telling the cameras she felt ‘super connected to love’. Below her, approximately 400 kilometres of atmospheric gas and years of cultural relevance separated her from the rest of us. Just a couple months prior, Justin Trudeau was clearing his desk in Ottawa, boxing up the cannabis, the selfies and the carefully curated optimism resulting from a decade in power.
They are two sides of the same coin: the aesthetic faces of a very specific political moment that felt like genuine momentum and progress. Not just cultural momentum, but actual hope; a widespread sense that history was finally moving in the right direction and the good guys had won.
In Canada, Trudeau was governing by vibe and jawline: bhangra dancing on state visits, a feminist cabinet assembled with a bow, ‘sock diplomacy’ elevated to foreign policy. Playing in everyone’s wired earphones in the 2010s was Katy Perry, who headlined the Superbowl in 2015 wearing a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dress while riding a giant mechanical shark, shooting herself out of a cannon into a crowd of dancing beach balls. She was a symbol of women-empowerment and celebration, embodying many young people’s teenage dreams.
The 2010s rewarded both Trudeau and Perry with large crowds and glowing reviews, and for a split, Instagram-filtered #Wanderlust second, feeling progressive and being progressive meant the same thing… It was almost believable.
For Trudeau, the reckoning was a policy hangover. The cost of a home in Canada nearly doubled over his decade in power, producing a housing crisis that was treated as a communications problem. The carbon tax, his signature policy and moral centrepiece, collapsed under political pressure that even his own party ran from it like it never happened. Dozens of Indigenous communities spent the entirety of his tenure without running water, but their lands were at least acknowledged in speeches. Immigration targets were quietly walked back after the infrastructure to support them proved not to exist. Healthcare wait times worsened. Trudeau’s coalition fell apart, and he resigned.
Perry's reckoning was less momentous but no less telling, her album Witness arrived in 2017 to massive indifference. She had also been the face of feminism that was a mere aesthetic: a meow camouflaged as a roar, girl power without the politics. The great progressive wave of the 2010s produced multiple political crises, a string of flop eras and a very sincere cry in space.
That’s why the world turned to the man who speaks fluent stakeholder capitalism. Mark Carney, former Governor of the Bank of England, arrived as the adult in the room.
Polished, serious, the kind of man who flies to Davos to give speeches defending democracy and the liberal world order to other people who have also flown to Davos. He makes good points about the dangers of isolationism, the importance of multilateral cooperation and the need to defend open societies at a moment when they are under real pressure. The room nodded, agreed and flew home on private jets.
That is rather the point: liberalism's problem was never sincerity, nor was it the argument. It was the persistent belief that making the argument well, in the right room, to the right people, was the same as winning it. Carney’s Davos speech for Canada to “fundamentally reimagine” its economy was the policy, yet he is still a new single from the same label; better produced, with the same chord progression, much like Perry’s return from orbit. Both were loudly announced, earnestly meant, and somehow exactly what we'd heard before.
And so, we arrive at Coachella, where Trudeau and Perry were photographed together looking relaxed, unbothered and entirely at peace with themselves. Trudeau, freed from governance, returned to his natural form with the backwards cap, the festival wristband and a positive conviction that history will be kind to him.
The progressive pipeline continues: the old faces exit the stage, new ones step in and the same essential optimism finds a new host. Liberal hope does not collapse under the weight of its own failures – it just resets and books the Coachella tickets for someone new. That is either democracy's greatest strength or its most elegant flaw, depending on where you were sitting when the music stopped.
Life is funny that way. Katy Perry went to space to find meaning and cried, Trudeau built a decade on vibes and lost the room; now they’re the couple of failed liberalism, living their best lives. Carney now inherits the brief with less fashionable socks, and his soundtrack is currently being written. The only questions that remain are whether the next faces of liberal hope have googled what happened to the last ones, and whether, this time, the rocket actually goes somewhere.
Natasha is currently pursuing a Master of International Affairs at the Hertie School specialising in human rights and global governance, alongside a Master of Global Affairs at the Munk School, University of Toronto. She is interested in the nexus between law, policy, and governance.