In his opening paragraphs to the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx noted that people "make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."
It is one of the most basic and fundamental insights into the way our society, its politics and its mass thinking work, and yet its meaning is often forgotten or ignored.
We, as people exist in a context, and that context shapes the way we think and the way we act. That context is sometimes of our own making, in part or in whole, but regardless, it is inescapable and it frames the way we think, react and act as a society, often imperceptibly.
This social discourse evolves constantly, and the actions of politicians and political advocates help to shape what becomes the essential framework of their day.
The citizens of Ontario have come under a kind of full frontal ideological assault recently, delivered to them by an agent of their own provincial Liberal government, the former TD Bank economist Don Drummond. His commissioned report has recommended deep cuts to programmes that millions depend on. It disgracefully calls for the imposition of user fees on things like school buses (as one small example), massive cuts to health care, farcical ideas such as ending all day kindergarten or cutting access for seniors to medication, etc. It seeks to undue the little that the Liberals can claim as their attempts to reconstruct an inclusive civil society in the wake of the Harris years.
But what is fascinating about the Report is that the reaction to it has been akin to the reaction to a hurricane or some other unavoidable though unfortunate force of nature. Much of it has accepted its basic premises (even when somewhat critical) and has promoted it as a "bitter pill" that was overdue.
The "progressive" Toronto Star has had the Drummond Report as a link under its own masthead on its website since it came out. Some of its less interesting commentators, such as Martin Cohn, have written nonsensical articles with idiotic narratives about the "chickens coming home to roost" economically etc. The National Post, Globe and the Toronto Sun, hardly surprisingly, have embraced its recommendations with a glee bordering on the obscene. It is as if they cannot wait to take these programmes away from people and to watch life become that much harder for Ontario's citizens.
The report seeks to make constant the false ideas that neoconservatives used to deconstruct the post-war social compromise, and it seeks to do so as a kind of permanent counter-revolution against the gains of workers and other groups economically that were the dominant ideological hegemony and narrative after the Second World War and until the mid 1980's.
But the report did not fall out of the sky and its defenders are not merely post-modern Chicken Littles. It is the outcome of an ongoing process of ideological reeducation within the developed West that seeks to both reverse any traces of economic Social Democracy (in the traditional sense of the term) and that also seeks to make perpetual economic turmoil a constant so as to subsidize the lifestyles of people exactly like Don Drummond and so as to aid in the shareholder return driven amoral culture of profit that has destroyed the North American industrial base, wiped out the communities and jobs that existed for so many and that has successfully made even "left" parties sing its tune.
The idea, of course, is rather simple. Supposedly, despite decades of massive economic growth, despite record corporate profits, despite the fact that the wealthy are wealthy to a degree unparalleled since the "Gilded Age" era of capitalist Robber Barons, and despite the demonstrably obvious fact that our society is wealthier and has more overall social capital than it did forty years ago (and remember, the forces of capitalist ideological hegemony have hitched their fences to the logic of its capacity for perpetual growth, so they will not even deny this), we are still told to beleive that governments cannot afford to implement or sustain the kinds of programmes they introduced in the 1950's!
If that is the case then capitalism has manifestly failed. It has failed by even its own logic.
But how have we gotten to this point of absurdity? This surreality where we are told that capitalism has delivered tremendous material reward and incredible advances in social wealth, and yet, somehow, we cannot afford to fund basic social programmes and we are now suggesting that parents should PAY to have their kids bussed to schools that they have a legal right to have their kids attend.
And how is it that it is not noted that this supposed lecture and recipe for "recovery" comes from a social aristocrat, who was instructed to NOT discuss tax increases (not that he would have), and whose version of austerity would inflict far greater pain upon working people than it ever would upon those of his peculiar pedigree of social leach. Telling the masses to depend less on government while making an enormous personal sum off of government to say this.
Why did McGuinty hire him in the first place? Was it not perfectly obvious that Drummond had a vested interest in a specific agenda? To hire him to suggest how government could better govern itself was akin to appointing the head of the Yankees to run a commission on how to deal with revenue sharing in baseball. In other words, it was either stupid or this is what the McGuinty government wanted. It does not really matter which is true.
McGuinty, sensing perhaps that the "Report" would be nasty, tried to do the usual preparation for its impact in January, by telling everyone that they would all have to "share the pain" when the austerity regime started.
But never has this rhetoric been less true. There is no "sharing" that will occur. Millions of people will have their lives impacted on in ways that will range from the severe, in the case of the poor, to the serious, in the case of much of the middle class.
But others, like Don Drummond, given that tax increases are off the table, will feel little to nothing at all.
If you want to see how this really works, check out
http://www.mittbucks.com/
Here you will see that "sharing pain" in this era of grotesque inequality is a farce. For austerity to have an impact on the lives of the welathy like it will on the rest of us, taxes would have to be massively increased and laws put in place to remind corporations of their social responsibility to the society that created them and that they could not have existed without.
Instead, not a single party in mainstream "left" thinking is calling for anything like this at all.
They have completely capitulated to the forward march of the relentless neo-liberal economic logic of tax cuts, service cuts, deregulation, anti-unionism and much more.
Louis Menand of The New Yorker, when reviewing Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm" put what I am trying to say very well..."It's not only that more politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Tom Hayden. More politicians today sound like Goldwater than like Lyndon Johnson". What this was pointing out was that the ideological spectrum has changed to the point that the ideas of the "extreme" presidential candidate Barry Goldwater are now mainstream thinking, while the ideas of Johnson, who declared a "War on Poverty" that actually achieved results, would be regarded as unrealistically and even ridiculously radical now.
In Canada we can see the ideological shift in many ways. Unlike the USA and the UK, Canada took slightly longer to capitulate in the face of the new hegemony. Even as late as 1989, all federal parties were willing to agree that it was the function of government to actually attempt to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. They spectacularly failed to do so, but, far more significantly, none of them would really make this pledge now.
In 1995 a Liberal federal government introduced a budget that signified the first shift of "progressive" forces away from the ideas of interventionist government and the social responsibility of the wealthy and corporations.
The NDP has followed suit. It has also bought into all of the basic ideas of the new neo-liberal ideological framework, as is clearly shown in Manitoba, and, more bitterly, Nova Scotia, where the government has singularly failed to act on the few promises it made to organized labour and is bringing in a preliminary form of its own austerity agenda.
In Ontario the shift can be seen in how the party, which has sought in an entirely reactionary way to distance itself from its Bob Rae past, called their 2011 platform (such as it was) "The Plan for Affordable Change" as opposed to Bob Rae's "Agenda for the People". The difference in tone is quite telling. So is the reality that the ONDP's 2011 platform was far to the right of Rae's re-election platform in 1995 let alone the 1990 one.
Andrea Horwath, reflecting this now, released a statement calling for a "Balanced Approach to a Balanced Budget" as if a balanced approach is really what is needed and as if a balanced budget, with the fetishistic right wing reductionist logic that this entails, is actually what should be the government's focus as opposed to the well being of its citizens and the attempt to end the suffering and deprivation that poverty and social inequality cause.
The federal NDP has also done this, and the Jack Layton lead "Orange Crush" took opposition on what was without any doubt the most right wing platform the party has ever run on. Read it for yourself:
http://www.ndp.ca/platform
As with the Democrats in the US and most of the Socialist and Social Democratic parties in Europe, the Liberals and the NDP have bought into almost every fundamental aspect of the new ideological order and, by doing so, have created and helped to perpetuate the very ideas and philosophies that hinder them in their pursuit not only of power but of actually making a difference and being anything other than a last defence against the "Storm"
They have aided in their rhetoric, their platforms and, most importantly in their acceptance of the basic premises of the neo-liberal right, in perpetuating the ideological and social ideas that allowed this report to be taken seriously at all, which it would not have 30 years ago (despite the fact that our economy has supposedly "grown" so much in the meantime).
They have helped in every meaningful way to manufacture the world that created Don Drummond.
Showing posts with label ndp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ndp. Show all posts
Monday, February 20, 2012
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Seeking the Democratic Socialist in Canadian Political Life
Originally written as an open letter and published on the Ginger Blog, this piece, co-authored by Andrew Klochek, was picked up by and published on Babble in January of 2011.
Open Letter for a "NEW" Democratic Socialist Party
Sisters and Brothers,
In his Oct. 9th, 2010 column, titled "The NDP: Not your father's socialism," John Ivison of The National Post wrote about the NDP's "metamorphosis of an old 20th-century socialist party into a vibrant 21st-century social democratic party." What exactly a "21-st century social democratic party" looks like is hard to discern though a few clues were provided by Ivison in a lower paragraph in the story:
"Under former leader Alexa McDonough, the party proposed an excess profit tax on financial institutions, which would then finance a National Investment Bank managed by ‘business, labour, government and the community.' There was much talk of ending privatization and increasing public ownership; of raising corporate tax rates and imposing a ‘Millionaire's Tax' on inheritances over $1-million. On foreign policy, the party proposed dissenting from NATO over the use of nuclear weapons.
"The image presented today is very different. The ‘squeeze the rich' rhetoric has been abandoned, in favour of moderate language that tries to reconcile equality and economic well-being. ‘These goals.... are not in conflict, rather they depend on each other,' according to the party's current website."
The Post's track record on virtually every other major issue from the environment to the Middle East notwithstanding, the article's description of the NDP's current political stance is accurate. Indeed, it was proudly embraced by the NDP. A similar quote in a different article, this time in The Toronto Star about the Ontario NDP, was even reproduced on "beta" posters portraying Andrea Horwath standing in front of the slogan "Not Your Grandfather's NDP."
The coincidence is so profound it would almost lead one to wonder if the idea was planted in the heads of the journalists by the party itself. The political party, whose forerunner, the CCF, once held the label "Farmer, Labour, Socialist" above its symbol, no longer uses the word Socialist at all.
Why does this matter?
It matters because over the last 40 years, the ideology of neo-liberalism has won every battle in its attempts to reshape our society. It matters because its defeat of the very idea of activist government has emboldened those on the right, and shifted the thinking of those on the left. In short, the NDP is no longer your grandfather's NDP. It is, in fact, your grandfather's Progressive Conservative Party.
Welcome to the new capitalism, unopposed by any meaningful political challenge.
The political consensus that has emerged out of Washington and Ottawa's governing classes is that interventionist government is wrong, except when government intervention is needed to save their friends on Wall Street and Bay Street. It is clear that capitalism is unable to save itself under anything approaching a "free-market" system and the Depression that began in 2008 proves this. With the willing complicity of our self-proclaimed voices of the left, we have instituted a system of socialism and welfare for the rich.
The effect of this political order is to prop up the failures of our societies' wealthiest while abandoning everyone else, including our societies' most vulnerable, by stealing tens of millions of their dollars to fund CEO slush funds and salaries.
While workers were forced to make concessions and millions of them lost their jobs, CEO's salaries went nowhere but up, all subsidized by your tax dollars. Instead of using the power of government to declare war on poverty, we have declared war on the poor and the middle class.
The issue is not that the NDP supported stimulus spending in order to save jobs. The issue is that in supporting these measures, they did so without actively calling for fundamental changes to the system that required bailouts in the first place. As a result, in the final analysis they basically called for the government to back up the tremendous social inequality that is represented by these same CEOs who forced this bailout and yet are now making over 150 times what the average worker does.
This is the problem with operating within the current economic system.
We have become a nation so often obsessed with stories of crime and the fear of the other. Our nightly news and daily front pages focus inordinately on the pornography of crime and individual misery. Meanwhile we ignore the "mundane" suffering perpetuated on so many of our citizens and their children by poverty or the fear of poverty. Is the terror felt by millions of Canadians facing destitution by being one paycheque away from impoverishment not also a genuine crime?
Poverty and hunger is bullying and violence. Only on a mass scale. Want a crime, how about the crime of the outright injustice perpetrated by the government and its accomplices on the daily lives of workers and the middle class? How about the crime of hundreds of thousands of Canadian children living in poverty every day? So many of our politicians have pontificated on the issue of crime. They have stated that there will be zero tolerance for even the average 8-year-old schoolyard bully.
And yet where are those who will say that our society's and government's bullying and violence against poor children is also a crime? If you stand by while a child goes hungry, you are no different than those that would watch a child beaten. Some of our biggest criminals, who leave whole communities destroyed in the wake of their crime spree, go unpunished, and even celebrated. They, through their corporate actions, have harmed more children than any schoolyard bully ever will.
In the face of this system, the NDP, which once articulated a vision for an alternative economic order, now merely argues for changes that are cosmetic, not structural. Rather than help organize citizens at grassroots levels to fight this assault in their communities, they offer band-aid solutions while editing their language and image in the vain hope that they can marginally increase their seat total in an election which, even if they won, would do nothing to alter the political-economy of the country. The NDP is so goal driven in its single-minded obsession to win a few extra seats that it has disempowered its own membership and riding associations from having any meaningful democratic voice within the party at all. Virtually every significant campaign and policy decision is made by the party's central offices and dissident candidates and riding associations are routinely overruled or sidelined. The party does not even have a standing platform!
The time has come to fight, not individual aspects of the state-capitalist system, but rather State Capitalism itself. The time has come to fight against the corporations that have moved our jobs to China, impoverishing workers there while destroying jobs at home. The time has come to fight against the system that has ensured that many of our fellow citizens work most of their lives in temporary labour without health insurance or retirement benefits. The time has come to stand up against the neo-feudalism that creates a society where individual debt is at an all time high while CEOs, "movie stars" and entertainers earn more in a day than most hard-working Canadians will in a year or even a decade, and where they get totally different treatment by the legal system. Rest assured, if the person who stole the $50 TV out of your house is caught they will likely go to jail as opposed to an investment banker who screwed people out of their entire livelihoods.
The time has come to stand up against the daily violence of the system with its destruction of good jobs in Canada and its entrenchment of poverty in the third world, all designed to satisfy an unsustainable consumerism.
Most important of all, the time has come to organize a political movement that will oppose this state-capitalist system and to give voice to this sentiment within parliamentary democracy, as well as within our communities.
The question of whether or not such a new socialist movement will succeed in winning this or that riding in the next election is not of significant importance. The Reform Party, as well as the NDP in their more radical days, demonstrated that a grassroots movement can affect the nature of the political debate without winning even a minority government. It is this victory, the altering of the political discourse in the country, that is the most important victory to win.
The process of altering the political discourse is by no means easy. The forces of the political right have shifted the debate such that, even when they are not in office their policies are still enacted.
One should note that Conservatives were seen as a spent force intellectually in the mid-20th century. Yet within a few years, they had succeeded in destroying the New Deal and Great Society programs in the United States. In Canada, they enacted Free Trade, NAFTA while handing over public wealth to private interests. Those on the left should draw lessons from their victories. The most important lesson is that an organized grassroots movement can alter the political landscape more effectively than a political party that won an election on a platform patched together from focus groups and pollsters.
Focusing on short-term electoral victory may bring more immediate gratification compared with the hard work of building a grassroots movement that will reawaken opposition to the existing socio-economic order. But where has this led us? The left has done focused on short-termism for 30 years and we have only lost.
There is an alternative.
This alternative is:
• A vision of a political movement that will fight for workers' rights;
• A political movement that will fight to prevent the destitution of the middle class;
• A political movement that will stand up against corporate crime and its consequences in your community;
• A political movement that will work to empower employees so that they can take over enterprises when their managers have failed them;
• A political movement that will implement Pharmacare and Public Dental Insurance so that hundreds of thousands of Canadians don't have to decide between things like Asthma medication and their rent;
• A political movement that won't tell you that it will manage state-capitalism better, that won't tell you that it knows how to balance a budget in heels or how to implement a "fairer" austerity.
It could be a political movement that will challenge the very basis of the social order that made these false choices "necessary" at all.
It is an alternative that embraces the idea that a different and better Ontario is possible. That does not accept that poverty and suffering need to be a part of this Ontario. That sees that hope is better than fear and that inspiration is a more powerful force than good management. A movement, that will fight for a future based on democracy, social equality and justice.
This is the Democratic Socialist alternative.
Open Letter for a "NEW" Democratic Socialist Party
Sisters and Brothers,
In his Oct. 9th, 2010 column, titled "The NDP: Not your father's socialism," John Ivison of The National Post wrote about the NDP's "metamorphosis of an old 20th-century socialist party into a vibrant 21st-century social democratic party." What exactly a "21-st century social democratic party" looks like is hard to discern though a few clues were provided by Ivison in a lower paragraph in the story:
"Under former leader Alexa McDonough, the party proposed an excess profit tax on financial institutions, which would then finance a National Investment Bank managed by ‘business, labour, government and the community.' There was much talk of ending privatization and increasing public ownership; of raising corporate tax rates and imposing a ‘Millionaire's Tax' on inheritances over $1-million. On foreign policy, the party proposed dissenting from NATO over the use of nuclear weapons.
"The image presented today is very different. The ‘squeeze the rich' rhetoric has been abandoned, in favour of moderate language that tries to reconcile equality and economic well-being. ‘These goals.... are not in conflict, rather they depend on each other,' according to the party's current website."
The Post's track record on virtually every other major issue from the environment to the Middle East notwithstanding, the article's description of the NDP's current political stance is accurate. Indeed, it was proudly embraced by the NDP. A similar quote in a different article, this time in The Toronto Star about the Ontario NDP, was even reproduced on "beta" posters portraying Andrea Horwath standing in front of the slogan "Not Your Grandfather's NDP."
The coincidence is so profound it would almost lead one to wonder if the idea was planted in the heads of the journalists by the party itself. The political party, whose forerunner, the CCF, once held the label "Farmer, Labour, Socialist" above its symbol, no longer uses the word Socialist at all.
Why does this matter?
It matters because over the last 40 years, the ideology of neo-liberalism has won every battle in its attempts to reshape our society. It matters because its defeat of the very idea of activist government has emboldened those on the right, and shifted the thinking of those on the left. In short, the NDP is no longer your grandfather's NDP. It is, in fact, your grandfather's Progressive Conservative Party.
Welcome to the new capitalism, unopposed by any meaningful political challenge.
The political consensus that has emerged out of Washington and Ottawa's governing classes is that interventionist government is wrong, except when government intervention is needed to save their friends on Wall Street and Bay Street. It is clear that capitalism is unable to save itself under anything approaching a "free-market" system and the Depression that began in 2008 proves this. With the willing complicity of our self-proclaimed voices of the left, we have instituted a system of socialism and welfare for the rich.
The effect of this political order is to prop up the failures of our societies' wealthiest while abandoning everyone else, including our societies' most vulnerable, by stealing tens of millions of their dollars to fund CEO slush funds and salaries.
While workers were forced to make concessions and millions of them lost their jobs, CEO's salaries went nowhere but up, all subsidized by your tax dollars. Instead of using the power of government to declare war on poverty, we have declared war on the poor and the middle class.
The issue is not that the NDP supported stimulus spending in order to save jobs. The issue is that in supporting these measures, they did so without actively calling for fundamental changes to the system that required bailouts in the first place. As a result, in the final analysis they basically called for the government to back up the tremendous social inequality that is represented by these same CEOs who forced this bailout and yet are now making over 150 times what the average worker does.
This is the problem with operating within the current economic system.
We have become a nation so often obsessed with stories of crime and the fear of the other. Our nightly news and daily front pages focus inordinately on the pornography of crime and individual misery. Meanwhile we ignore the "mundane" suffering perpetuated on so many of our citizens and their children by poverty or the fear of poverty. Is the terror felt by millions of Canadians facing destitution by being one paycheque away from impoverishment not also a genuine crime?
Poverty and hunger is bullying and violence. Only on a mass scale. Want a crime, how about the crime of the outright injustice perpetrated by the government and its accomplices on the daily lives of workers and the middle class? How about the crime of hundreds of thousands of Canadian children living in poverty every day? So many of our politicians have pontificated on the issue of crime. They have stated that there will be zero tolerance for even the average 8-year-old schoolyard bully.
And yet where are those who will say that our society's and government's bullying and violence against poor children is also a crime? If you stand by while a child goes hungry, you are no different than those that would watch a child beaten. Some of our biggest criminals, who leave whole communities destroyed in the wake of their crime spree, go unpunished, and even celebrated. They, through their corporate actions, have harmed more children than any schoolyard bully ever will.
In the face of this system, the NDP, which once articulated a vision for an alternative economic order, now merely argues for changes that are cosmetic, not structural. Rather than help organize citizens at grassroots levels to fight this assault in their communities, they offer band-aid solutions while editing their language and image in the vain hope that they can marginally increase their seat total in an election which, even if they won, would do nothing to alter the political-economy of the country. The NDP is so goal driven in its single-minded obsession to win a few extra seats that it has disempowered its own membership and riding associations from having any meaningful democratic voice within the party at all. Virtually every significant campaign and policy decision is made by the party's central offices and dissident candidates and riding associations are routinely overruled or sidelined. The party does not even have a standing platform!
The time has come to fight, not individual aspects of the state-capitalist system, but rather State Capitalism itself. The time has come to fight against the corporations that have moved our jobs to China, impoverishing workers there while destroying jobs at home. The time has come to fight against the system that has ensured that many of our fellow citizens work most of their lives in temporary labour without health insurance or retirement benefits. The time has come to stand up against the neo-feudalism that creates a society where individual debt is at an all time high while CEOs, "movie stars" and entertainers earn more in a day than most hard-working Canadians will in a year or even a decade, and where they get totally different treatment by the legal system. Rest assured, if the person who stole the $50 TV out of your house is caught they will likely go to jail as opposed to an investment banker who screwed people out of their entire livelihoods.
The time has come to stand up against the daily violence of the system with its destruction of good jobs in Canada and its entrenchment of poverty in the third world, all designed to satisfy an unsustainable consumerism.
Most important of all, the time has come to organize a political movement that will oppose this state-capitalist system and to give voice to this sentiment within parliamentary democracy, as well as within our communities.
The question of whether or not such a new socialist movement will succeed in winning this or that riding in the next election is not of significant importance. The Reform Party, as well as the NDP in their more radical days, demonstrated that a grassroots movement can affect the nature of the political debate without winning even a minority government. It is this victory, the altering of the political discourse in the country, that is the most important victory to win.
The process of altering the political discourse is by no means easy. The forces of the political right have shifted the debate such that, even when they are not in office their policies are still enacted.
One should note that Conservatives were seen as a spent force intellectually in the mid-20th century. Yet within a few years, they had succeeded in destroying the New Deal and Great Society programs in the United States. In Canada, they enacted Free Trade, NAFTA while handing over public wealth to private interests. Those on the left should draw lessons from their victories. The most important lesson is that an organized grassroots movement can alter the political landscape more effectively than a political party that won an election on a platform patched together from focus groups and pollsters.
Focusing on short-term electoral victory may bring more immediate gratification compared with the hard work of building a grassroots movement that will reawaken opposition to the existing socio-economic order. But where has this led us? The left has done focused on short-termism for 30 years and we have only lost.
There is an alternative.
This alternative is:
• A vision of a political movement that will fight for workers' rights;
• A political movement that will fight to prevent the destitution of the middle class;
• A political movement that will stand up against corporate crime and its consequences in your community;
• A political movement that will work to empower employees so that they can take over enterprises when their managers have failed them;
• A political movement that will implement Pharmacare and Public Dental Insurance so that hundreds of thousands of Canadians don't have to decide between things like Asthma medication and their rent;
• A political movement that won't tell you that it will manage state-capitalism better, that won't tell you that it knows how to balance a budget in heels or how to implement a "fairer" austerity.
It could be a political movement that will challenge the very basis of the social order that made these false choices "necessary" at all.
It is an alternative that embraces the idea that a different and better Ontario is possible. That does not accept that poverty and suffering need to be a part of this Ontario. That sees that hope is better than fear and that inspiration is a more powerful force than good management. A movement, that will fight for a future based on democracy, social equality and justice.
This is the Democratic Socialist alternative.
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
The Peculiar Case of Ruth Ellen Brosseau
First published just after the election this year. This one is totally unmodified and remains exactly how I feel about the subject.
There is not much to happy about in this election.
Stephen Harper got his long coveted majority and the damage that this will do to the country may take many years to repair. The NDP won political opposition on a sudden Orange Surge but did so on an entirely leader driven imagery and a policy platform not only bereft of anything meaningful in terms of transformative social policy, but actually to the right of the Liberal platform in certain key areas. While the obliteration of the Liberal Party by a more left-wing electoral force is of tremendous significance, in that no one can any longer doubt or deny that it is possible to do this, only the most partisan New Democrat incapable of distinguishing what is good for the party and what is good for the people, can think that this election result will have anything other than a catastrophic impact on the lives of working and middle class Canadians, and that it is, in a key way, a real defeat for the forces left, not a victory.
In a non-minority parliament the NDP will now have less influence than before, not more, on the actual governance of the nation and the nature of the system gives the forces of capital and reaction plenty of time to retrench and attempt to reverse NDP gains. This is especially true given that the party will not attempt the popular mobilization needed to stop Harper's agenda and the very high probability that having seen its strategy to squeeze the Liberals out by pushing to the centre of the spectrum bear fruit, the party brass will intensify this process, not lessen or reverse it.
But, as always in the great human endeavour that is democracy, there is a silver lining to all of this.
It is, of course, true that unexpected sweeps bring people into parliament that no one expected to see there. It is a great thing that Canada elected its first Tamil MP. It also very positive to see young people, students, and workers get elected. This makes the complexion of parliament more democratic and inspiring even if it does not result in its legislation being this way.
But to me, one of the most misinterpreted moments of the election is of even greater significance. It points to a very real democratic and popular yearning that lies just beneath the surface of our era's popular mood of discontent with our institutions of governance.
And it is the victory of Ruth Ellen Brosseau.
There can be little doubt that Canadians are broadly tired of our existing political culture and contemptuous of its entirely scripted and facile content. This culture, driven by the pollsters and spin doctors of the parties, celebrates the vacuous and places great emphasis on soaring but empty rhetoric meant to inspire without the need to really say much. The Obamaesque qualities of Harper's "Canada" ad, or, frankly, of Layton's entire campaign, is the high point of what are tightly managed sound bites centred around targeted messaging seeking to hammer home two-or-three points that have been chosen from minuscule election "platforms" for a variety of demographic reasons. People are being sold a bill of goods, a branded commodity. And they know it.
The parties even, when it succeeds, sometimes openly celebrate it, as in this rather odious little quote:
"We've been absolutely fixated on making sure that we run a first-rate campaign with a strong message, and we knew that message out there was, 'Ottawa is broken, it's time to fix it. It's time that it works for families to get things done,'" NDP national director Brad Lavigne told CBC Monday night.
"We attached that to the right demographics in the right ridings across the country, and the great thing about tonight is that the growth is everywhere. It's in Atlantic Canada. New seats in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Throughout Ontario and the West."-CBC News May 3rd 2011
Yes, Brad, it is great, but only for the NDP itself.
They justify such a philosophy with rubbish about "getting results", that getting elected is the "purpose" of political parties, etc., that this is the "job" of parties, without the slightest sense that this type of politics is exactly what is fuelling the long-term cynicism and anger of disenfranchisement that all too often finds expression in the campaigns of wealthy populists like Rob Ford.
The days of renegade MPs, serious discourse and visions for change in society and government that go beyond the merely cosmetic or managerial, to the extent that they ever existed, are gone.
Parties are terrified of moments going "off message" and they are mortified of independently minded candidates who might "say" or "do" "something" that might divert the media's attention away from whatever sound bite the leader is about to deliver. This is just as true, if not in some ways more so, in the NDP which has developed a new and repugnant tactic of blocking people that they feel might be worrisome and independent from seeking nomination at all!
Campaigns, even such fatuous ones, when they catch fire can still stir citizens up in entirely unanticipated political moments of democratic outburst as happened with Rae in Ontario, or the ADQ and now the NDP in Quebec. These moments, when they happen, show that it is still possible for people to actually change things and assert their power, even if it does not always deliver what drove them to do it. In fact, the very failure of the banal rhetoric to produce meaningful results in their actual lives is entirely why the democratic outbursts so often do not last.
And this in turn leads even more citizens to feel that they have heard it all before, that nothing will change anyway, and that the "politicians" are all the same, power driven and plastic.
Then there is the peculiar case of Ruth Ellen Brosseau.
Brosseau, as you are no doubt aware, is the assistant pub manager and single mother in Ottawa who ran for the NDP in the Quebec riding of Berthier - Maskinongé and won. She did so despite the widespread PRE-election publicity that she not only did not live in the riding but may never have even set foot in it, that she barely spoke French and that she went to Las Vegas for the last two weeks of the campaign.
The insults were fast and furious. She was described as a "bimbo", "white trash", a "joke", and much worse. I read many comments about her, including one that stated "Now we know who will be serving the drinks at Jack's dinner parties". The inherent ignorance, elitism and sexism of the comments is a disgrace and exposes the dark underbelly of patriarchal condescension that lingers in the attitudes of all too many.
(I for one, think that the life experiences of a hard working single mother who quite rightly did not lose the opportunity to take a planned trip to Vegas because of an election no one thought she could win, have more bearing on the ACTUAL essence of why the NDP is supposed to be fighting for social justice than the life experiences of many in the party, including her leader's, but I digress).
This was a media moment, when revealed, that was certainly "off message"!
And what happened? She, despite these revelations, went on to win over her closest rival by 10% of the vote!
The cynics will say that these were votes for the party and Jack. There is, no doubt, a lot of truth to that. They will further say that this is actually what is "wrong" with our system, that people would vote this way in spite of these facts and that it reveals the average voter's lack of political sophistication.
I disagree.
I think that many political commentators and many of the politically minded grossly underestimate the sophistication of the average voter. They do so because this helps explain things when they don't turn out as they anticipated or as they wanted. Sometimes, as in the totally bankrupt visions of neo- vanguardists and others, it helps to justify their own "duty" to lead the masses out of the morass of their own ignorance.
When the citizens of her riding found out about their NDP candidate prior to voting, they had more than enough time to digest this and...they didn't care! Not because of a lack of sophistication or a blind impulse to vote NDP, but because, I suspect, many of them actually liked what they heard. And, in an entirely sophisticated way, they knew that she was, without doubt, a change!
Here, undeniably, was a "politician" who was not one at all. A bartender, a single-mother, and a person with the good sense to know that a vacation she had no doubt long saved for was important to her.
I have little doubt that, in reality, these facts helped to solidify the resolve of those who were going out to vote for her, not weaken it. That it fed into the overall sense that they were repudiating the politics that had dominated Quebec on the federal level for so long and that Brousseau was also a repudiation of this.
I suspect that many actually rather relished voting for her because of these "revelations" , not in spite of them. And rightfully so, in this case.
All too often when this happens people will express this anger through backing freeloaders from the upper classes like Rob Ford who mould themselves to appear as "men-of-the-people" despite lives handed to them by wealth and privilege. I don't think that those who support such figures are ignorant. I think they are angry. And justifiably.
But here they have elected a genuine working person who is like their neighbours. Who works at a real job, who has to pay the bills as a single mom, and who faces the same challenges they do.
And I for one, suspect she will be a breath of fresh air on parliament hill.
But even if not, her victory was a real victory for democracy. For all the reasons above, and if for no other reason than it proves the Brad Lavignes wrong. What it proves is that if an idea is strong enough, if a popular feeling has enough depth, our neighbours and fellow citizens will not have their desire for change stopped by straying "off message".
And one can only speculate what a real platform, full of real off-message ideas and built by real, open and honest debate might inspire in people.
And who might come forward to represent that platform.
Welcome to Canada's Parliament Ms. Brosseau. No matter how anything turns out, it was the better for you having been elected to it.
There is not much to happy about in this election.
Stephen Harper got his long coveted majority and the damage that this will do to the country may take many years to repair. The NDP won political opposition on a sudden Orange Surge but did so on an entirely leader driven imagery and a policy platform not only bereft of anything meaningful in terms of transformative social policy, but actually to the right of the Liberal platform in certain key areas. While the obliteration of the Liberal Party by a more left-wing electoral force is of tremendous significance, in that no one can any longer doubt or deny that it is possible to do this, only the most partisan New Democrat incapable of distinguishing what is good for the party and what is good for the people, can think that this election result will have anything other than a catastrophic impact on the lives of working and middle class Canadians, and that it is, in a key way, a real defeat for the forces left, not a victory.
In a non-minority parliament the NDP will now have less influence than before, not more, on the actual governance of the nation and the nature of the system gives the forces of capital and reaction plenty of time to retrench and attempt to reverse NDP gains. This is especially true given that the party will not attempt the popular mobilization needed to stop Harper's agenda and the very high probability that having seen its strategy to squeeze the Liberals out by pushing to the centre of the spectrum bear fruit, the party brass will intensify this process, not lessen or reverse it.
But, as always in the great human endeavour that is democracy, there is a silver lining to all of this.
It is, of course, true that unexpected sweeps bring people into parliament that no one expected to see there. It is a great thing that Canada elected its first Tamil MP. It also very positive to see young people, students, and workers get elected. This makes the complexion of parliament more democratic and inspiring even if it does not result in its legislation being this way.
But to me, one of the most misinterpreted moments of the election is of even greater significance. It points to a very real democratic and popular yearning that lies just beneath the surface of our era's popular mood of discontent with our institutions of governance.
And it is the victory of Ruth Ellen Brosseau.
There can be little doubt that Canadians are broadly tired of our existing political culture and contemptuous of its entirely scripted and facile content. This culture, driven by the pollsters and spin doctors of the parties, celebrates the vacuous and places great emphasis on soaring but empty rhetoric meant to inspire without the need to really say much. The Obamaesque qualities of Harper's "Canada" ad, or, frankly, of Layton's entire campaign, is the high point of what are tightly managed sound bites centred around targeted messaging seeking to hammer home two-or-three points that have been chosen from minuscule election "platforms" for a variety of demographic reasons. People are being sold a bill of goods, a branded commodity. And they know it.
The parties even, when it succeeds, sometimes openly celebrate it, as in this rather odious little quote:
"We've been absolutely fixated on making sure that we run a first-rate campaign with a strong message, and we knew that message out there was, 'Ottawa is broken, it's time to fix it. It's time that it works for families to get things done,'" NDP national director Brad Lavigne told CBC Monday night.
"We attached that to the right demographics in the right ridings across the country, and the great thing about tonight is that the growth is everywhere. It's in Atlantic Canada. New seats in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Throughout Ontario and the West."-CBC News May 3rd 2011
Yes, Brad, it is great, but only for the NDP itself.
They justify such a philosophy with rubbish about "getting results", that getting elected is the "purpose" of political parties, etc., that this is the "job" of parties, without the slightest sense that this type of politics is exactly what is fuelling the long-term cynicism and anger of disenfranchisement that all too often finds expression in the campaigns of wealthy populists like Rob Ford.
The days of renegade MPs, serious discourse and visions for change in society and government that go beyond the merely cosmetic or managerial, to the extent that they ever existed, are gone.
Parties are terrified of moments going "off message" and they are mortified of independently minded candidates who might "say" or "do" "something" that might divert the media's attention away from whatever sound bite the leader is about to deliver. This is just as true, if not in some ways more so, in the NDP which has developed a new and repugnant tactic of blocking people that they feel might be worrisome and independent from seeking nomination at all!
Campaigns, even such fatuous ones, when they catch fire can still stir citizens up in entirely unanticipated political moments of democratic outburst as happened with Rae in Ontario, or the ADQ and now the NDP in Quebec. These moments, when they happen, show that it is still possible for people to actually change things and assert their power, even if it does not always deliver what drove them to do it. In fact, the very failure of the banal rhetoric to produce meaningful results in their actual lives is entirely why the democratic outbursts so often do not last.
And this in turn leads even more citizens to feel that they have heard it all before, that nothing will change anyway, and that the "politicians" are all the same, power driven and plastic.
Then there is the peculiar case of Ruth Ellen Brosseau.
Brosseau, as you are no doubt aware, is the assistant pub manager and single mother in Ottawa who ran for the NDP in the Quebec riding of Berthier - Maskinongé and won. She did so despite the widespread PRE-election publicity that she not only did not live in the riding but may never have even set foot in it, that she barely spoke French and that she went to Las Vegas for the last two weeks of the campaign.
The insults were fast and furious. She was described as a "bimbo", "white trash", a "joke", and much worse. I read many comments about her, including one that stated "Now we know who will be serving the drinks at Jack's dinner parties". The inherent ignorance, elitism and sexism of the comments is a disgrace and exposes the dark underbelly of patriarchal condescension that lingers in the attitudes of all too many.
(I for one, think that the life experiences of a hard working single mother who quite rightly did not lose the opportunity to take a planned trip to Vegas because of an election no one thought she could win, have more bearing on the ACTUAL essence of why the NDP is supposed to be fighting for social justice than the life experiences of many in the party, including her leader's, but I digress).
This was a media moment, when revealed, that was certainly "off message"!
And what happened? She, despite these revelations, went on to win over her closest rival by 10% of the vote!
The cynics will say that these were votes for the party and Jack. There is, no doubt, a lot of truth to that. They will further say that this is actually what is "wrong" with our system, that people would vote this way in spite of these facts and that it reveals the average voter's lack of political sophistication.
I disagree.
I think that many political commentators and many of the politically minded grossly underestimate the sophistication of the average voter. They do so because this helps explain things when they don't turn out as they anticipated or as they wanted. Sometimes, as in the totally bankrupt visions of neo- vanguardists and others, it helps to justify their own "duty" to lead the masses out of the morass of their own ignorance.
When the citizens of her riding found out about their NDP candidate prior to voting, they had more than enough time to digest this and...they didn't care! Not because of a lack of sophistication or a blind impulse to vote NDP, but because, I suspect, many of them actually liked what they heard. And, in an entirely sophisticated way, they knew that she was, without doubt, a change!
Here, undeniably, was a "politician" who was not one at all. A bartender, a single-mother, and a person with the good sense to know that a vacation she had no doubt long saved for was important to her.
I have little doubt that, in reality, these facts helped to solidify the resolve of those who were going out to vote for her, not weaken it. That it fed into the overall sense that they were repudiating the politics that had dominated Quebec on the federal level for so long and that Brousseau was also a repudiation of this.
I suspect that many actually rather relished voting for her because of these "revelations" , not in spite of them. And rightfully so, in this case.
All too often when this happens people will express this anger through backing freeloaders from the upper classes like Rob Ford who mould themselves to appear as "men-of-the-people" despite lives handed to them by wealth and privilege. I don't think that those who support such figures are ignorant. I think they are angry. And justifiably.
But here they have elected a genuine working person who is like their neighbours. Who works at a real job, who has to pay the bills as a single mom, and who faces the same challenges they do.
And I for one, suspect she will be a breath of fresh air on parliament hill.
But even if not, her victory was a real victory for democracy. For all the reasons above, and if for no other reason than it proves the Brad Lavignes wrong. What it proves is that if an idea is strong enough, if a popular feeling has enough depth, our neighbours and fellow citizens will not have their desire for change stopped by straying "off message".
And one can only speculate what a real platform, full of real off-message ideas and built by real, open and honest debate might inspire in people.
And who might come forward to represent that platform.
Welcome to Canada's Parliament Ms. Brosseau. No matter how anything turns out, it was the better for you having been elected to it.
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