Republicans still seem to believe the unlikely proposition that elections are won on the angry margins. The two leading Republican candidates, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, try to outgun each other in attacking, respectively, Mexican immigration and the idea of a Muslim president in the White House (don’t hold your breath). The Trudeau story suggests limits to the bullying politics of anger and fear. Not even Lynton Crosby, the legendary Australian master of the take-no-hostage dark political arts, could revive Harper’s fortunes.

Camelot has come to Canada. For a moment at least, the duller part of North America looks sexier than its overweening cousin to the south. Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire, have razzmatazz. The incoming prime minister is very much his father’s son, a natural charmer. There’s no point denying it. The American political field looks wizened by comparison.

You don’t have to be seduced by Trudeau’s happy talk of “sunny ways,” or be persuaded by Trudeau’s Obamaesque allusions to the “better angels of our nature,” or be convinced by the equally Obamaesque references from Trudeau to the arc of the moral universe bending “toward justice” — all this will be tested by the harsh realities of power in a big country of competing interests. The glitter, it is safe to say, will fade. Shadows will dim the Trudeau sun. But the political tide has turned in Canada.

It has turned away from austerity toward deficit spending on infrastructure and growth — and this in a country where balanced budgets are, in Freeland’s words, “almost a fetish.” It has turned away from widening inequality (yes, even in Canada) toward addressing the challenges to social cohesion from globalization. It has turned away from Harper’s weird Canadian unilateralism toward a rediscovery of Canada’s traditional multilateral, United Nations-focused approach to foreign policy and leadership on refugee issues. It has turned away from bruising confrontation toward civility in politics.

Trudeau represents a break in style but also in economic approach at a time when sharpening inequality is probably the foremost issue in developed Western societies. In this sense, too, his election may be telling on the eve of a United States election year.

“One of the most difficult and urgent global problems is how to develop societies where people of different cultures can live together and build common ground,” Trudeau said during the campaign. If he does not lead on this issue — in Canada and beyond Canada — he will have failed the promise he represents.