Justin Trudeau Was His Own Worst Enemy

In the sunny beginnings of Justin Trudeau’s time in power, a journalist asked him why his cabinet was 50 percent female. Mr. Trudeau gave a now well-known response: “Because it’s 2015.” If you want to know why on Monday he announced his plan to resign as prime minister, the answer is just as simple: Because it’s 2025.

Mr. Trudeau’s political career has followed the arc of global progressive politics over the past decade, reflecting its transformation from a pose of optimistic cool to its present state of despair. At the beginning of his time in office, New York magazine depicted Mr. Trudeau as a cutout paper doll with costumes, which seemed about right. Now he’s increasingly the butt of jokes from the manosphere.

In 2015, Mr. Trudeau was at the forefront of a new kind of politics, both in terms of how he came to power and how he chose to use it. He harnessed the emerging force of social media with his easygoing celebrity to win his first election. Once in office, he stressed the gender and ethnicity of the people he put in important positions as much as what they planned to do with the power they possessed. Now, identity politics have helped bring about his downfall, and social media networks have soured on him.

Mr. Trudeau stayed who he was. The times changed around him. The worst you can say about him, and I have, is that he could not face the realities of a newly polarized world. But that inability has roots in what brought him to office in the first place.

“There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2015. “There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first post-national state.”

This vision, when he articulated it, seemed powerfully contemporary, steering Canada in the same direction as an opening, borderless world of expanding cross-cultural and economic exchange. He did not ask himself — few did — what a “post-national state” would look like, or if it would work.