So we've just had white supremacists elected to a majority government in Alberta.
We've got white supremacists in majority government in Ontario.
What is going on?
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3322 has the important graphic
(short version; billions die by 2100.)
All power is unitary.
All power is also social; it arises from people co-operating. If people ignore you, you have no power.
Carbon-binge status quo arises from the military utility (and then general ubiquity) of fossil carbon power sources. It's traded a brisk and global round of looting for (probable [0]) human extinction.
This is the kind of thing that leads to a loss of legitimacy; people stop thinking it's a good idea to do what you say. If the extinction isn't especially abrupt, circumstances become risky for incumbents in positions of power and authority.
There's three possible responses to our present circumstance; you can go authoritarian (the overt white supremacy), you can waffle energetically (everybody saying earnest things about climate change while approving new fossil carbon infrastructure, or, alternatively, lying vigorously in ways meant to prevent coherent action; they're both acting to preserve the status quo), or you can try to figure out how to preserve enough decarbonized industrial civilization to keep as many people and as much ecosystem alive in the future.
There's a lot of political risk in trying to deal with the problem; for example, if you start taking the third step seriously, there's no reason not to, and a bunch of positive reasons to, try every oil company exec since 1980 for deliberate, for-profit genocide. "But everyone is complicit!" doesn't address how everyone wasn't making policy, and the how the people making policy went for maintaining the status quo. (It's a bit like a leaking roof; you fix it as soon as you notice it. If you wait, everything gets worse. We've seen the politics of hogging the dry spots play out these last two generations, and are seeing them now.)
Things are now obviously bad enough that the third option -- try to fix the problem -- has open political advocacy that wants to actually do it, instead of waffling about it as a means of maintaining the status quo. The incumbents think this is an intolerable threat to their current wealth and power, and, well, they do have most of the money, and people are more-or-less defenseless against modern media. (We're a band-forming social primate; an environment where you get lied to continuously in ways you can't check is not in our evolutionary history, and we're pretty much defenseless against automated approaches to bulk lying. Were we to survive as a species for another ten or twenty generations, that would change.)
Thing is, we're losing the current status quo. Sure as death, sure as fate. Keeping the status quo isn't an option.
That's going to inform all politics henceforward; that is all politics henceforward. What future do you want? Are we trying for some material chance of general prosperity into the indefinite future, or are we absolutely determined that those now rich get to die that way?
(The white supremacists are in the "all die, but at least the social hierarchy didn't change!" camp. Since the social hierarchy involved is the one that caused this mess, it's a clear example of consistency failing to be a virtue.)
[0] the default human thing is being a hunter-gatherer, but being a hunter-gatherer is hard; you need to know a lot of stuff about your specific environment and have a broad range of skills. Being a hunter-gatherer from a starting place of negative skills and knowledge in a depauperate ecology undergoing a mass extinction? Not going to work. Humans evolved in the Holocene, and we've left the Holocene. "Deadly threshold" means no agriculture there; no ability to do the work, and plants don't like that much heat either. Add in the other reasons for agriculture to fail.
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