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For this, he was voted out of office and laughed out of a leadership race. That was his downfall. Now here’s the kicker:

Alexander, the man who refuses to go quietly or with any semblance of dignity, has written a Maclean’s op-ed in which he implores people to please quiet down and conduct ourselves with greater dignity.

“Journalists should show sustained concern for Canadian politicians,” he writes. Mainstream “scribes” give the extremist right “its opening,” he writes. There’s not enough “credible news” here, he writes, and not that much extremism. And we should all come together, for he of the barbaric cultural practices hotline, hates “inflammatory” attempts to divide.

He does say, in a pantomime of an admission, that his government was “tone-deaf.” But he knew exactly what tune the far-right sings to — he adjusted his pitch accordingly.

The best defence for Alexander, then, is that he was insincere: perceptive enough to see opportunities to win and ambitious enough to go for them.

And it’s almost tempting to defend him! Alexander’s problem isn’t that he’s an unforgivably bad person (by all accounts, he isn’t), or that he did an unforgivably bad thing (by every reasonable historical standard, he didn’t) or even that he hasn’t issued a mea culpa (no one’s waiting for one).

The trouble is that Alexander is still scapegoating supposed elites, a favoured tactic of far-right populists he insists he always despised, because they don’t “reflect (Canadians’) reality.” Which is to say, a reality that could have won him an election.