Year of the word

"Go everywhere. Talk to everyone." Notes on the New Verbosity.

Suddenly our politics is all about the written and spoken word. Not so long ago we had a prime minister who did his best to hide for weeks and an opposition leader who refused to take reporters with him on a national campaign. Now the newish PM and his rebooted opponent can’t stop talking.

Mark Carney turns the world on its ear with a Davos speech that quotes Havel and Thucydides. Pierre Poilievre, having saved his Conservative leadership bacon, for the nonce, with a 49-minute convention keynote, responds to Carney with a six-page written statement, a speech to the sort of Bay Street crowd he used to disdain, appearances on the podcasts of assorted superannuated centrists, and a kettle-bell run to Austin for two and a quarter hours with Joe Rogan.

These are only the main skirmishes of a winter-long logorrheic war of attrition between Canadian politics’ two silverbacks. There have been other outbreaks. Carney welcomed Monocle boutique impresario Tyler Brûlé for a half-hour in Tokyo. Poilievre’s US tour included a Manhattan keynote and still another media interview, details undisclosed by his press team until the thing had happened. Politico guessed Fox News, reasonably enough, but Poilievre chose instead to talk to Bloomberg, yet another shot at rehabilitating himself with the conventional-wisdom crowd he once made a point of mocking. Poilievre’s deputy, Melissa Lantsman, summed up the new approach with what must, this year, stand as rare succinctness:

Warming up in the on-deck circle is Avi Lewis, a third-generation raconteur whose main contribution to Canadian politics before now was an unusually successful co-authored manifesto a decade ago and whose big Ottawa rally in the NDP leadership race featured a 50-minute stem-winder.

There are examples outside Canada as well. Ukraine’s resistance against Russian invasion has been characterized as much by Volodymyr Zelensky’s relentless cajoling diplomacy as by his armies’ multiple mayfly generations of drone innovation. JD Vance’s 2025 Munich speech announced a paradigm shift, indeed a stomach-churning inversion, in the Trump administration’s view of U.S.-European relations.

Something is happening. The dam has burst on almost two decades of tightly-managed, coordinated and targeted political messaging. In its place we’re seeing a communications approach that’s more free-flowing, discursive, open and adaptable.

This New Verbosity isn’t sure to succeed. Nothing is. But it’s a firm rejection of an approach that’s been tried, endlessly, monolithically, and found wanting. The times are too chaotic to accommodate the stately and cynical work of mass message-craft. The constantly accelerating chaos of this manic century is forcing at least a partial return to older crafts: argument, oratory, and the give-and-take of real conversation.

And incidentally, I’m as sorry to say this as you’ll be to hear it, but a big catalyst of this change was Donald Trump.