I recently heard a podcast where a veteran pollster was interviewing a political strategist for one of the main parties. One of the things that made me grind my teeth was when one of them referred to politics as "a game". It's not the first time I've heard that, but right now I have precious little patience left for this attitude. The reason is pretty simple and easily explained. As I understand it, a "game" is something that people play for "fun" or "amusement". Unfortunately, for many people the consequences of politics are anything but "fun" or "amusing"---instead, the results are often matters of life or death.
I've felt this way for a large part of my life. Another recent experience that triggered me was watching Mitch McConnell justifying his actions during Trump's second impeachment trial. Here's a short, edited clip from You Tube that illustrates what I'm talking about.
Mitch McConnell is probably one of the worst examples I can think of someone who treats every political issue as a game to be played and won irrespective of how it impacts on the lives of ordinary people. As Nancy Pelosi explains in the above clip, when leader of the Senate majority he stopped the trial of President Trump before Biden had been sworn in as his successor---then after the inauguration said he couldn't cast a guilty vote because Trump was out of office. That's pretty much a text-book example of "political gamesmanship".
When watching this I couldn't forget that Trump and the Republicans whipped naive supporters into a frenzy by suggesting that the Democrats had stolen the presidential election. And as a result, five people died in the attack on the capital. Three of them appear to have simply been people who had really bad health conditions and the excitement of being involved in a riot "pushed them over the edge". But two of them appear to have been violently killed: Brian Sicknick and Ashli Babbit.
Look into both of their faces. These are people who died because of political games.
Officer Sicknick died from a stroke after being sprayed with an "unknown chemical substance". Ashli Babbit died after she was shot dead by a police officer while she tried to climb through a broken window to let in a horde of people screaming for the blood of the Vice-President and other members of Congress. Oddly enough, both of them had a couple things in common. There were both Air Force veterans and Trump supporters.
Here's the thing that we all have to remember when faced by situations like this. Human beings generally labour under the illusion that we are all smart and informed enough to make good decisions. But the fact of the matter is we are all the products of our up-bringing, the accidents of our work life, the class we were born into, the education we may or may not have received, and, so forth. All of us are vulnerable---admittedly to a greater or lesser degree---to being whipped into a frenzy by people telling us lies.
If any of my readers doubt this, consider the following question "How many people do you know who don't follow the same religion as their parents?" Sure, you probably know some folks who either joined another tradition or gave up the whole thing altogether. Possibly you did too. But what do you think is the percentage of people in the general population have consciously made this sort of change? I would suggest that the majority of people just continue on whatever path their parents set out for them and haven't the given the subject much thought at all. Is this evidence in support of reasoned individual decision-making, or, the influence of random environmental factors?
Religion is just an easy example to point out. Much the same thing could be said for a lot of other, less clearly-defined issues---political worldview, aesthetics, how you make a living, etc. The fact of the matter is that even the most well-informed, thoughtful people can get talked into supporting stupid crap.
I first thought about this when I was a teenager and I learned a bit about a friend's personal history. His family had come from Germany and were very complicit in the Holocaust. His dad had been a Storm Trooper and carried a flag at Nuremburg rallies. Two of his uncles had been SS members---and were executed as war criminals after the war. I also had friends who's parents had been in concentration camps. But we all got along well enough. What that told me was that the things that make people similar are inherently stronger than what keep us apart---but a lot of people are vulnerable to the games that politicians play to pit one group of people against another.
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Many years ago I once got into a conversation with a graduate student in political science. At that time I was very involved in building the Green Party---both in Guelph and across the country. I got into my spiel about how we need to take the environment seriously because the carrying capacity of the earth has been overshot. You could see that he was developing some interest in what I had to say, but he asked me a question that was new to me. It went something to the effect of "what statistical analysis do you have to support the idea that people would vote for such a party?" I responded with something like "it really doesn't matter how many people think like this---it's simply a truth that needs to be integrated into political decision-making. The point of political organizing is to educate the public so they can understand". At this point you could see the doors to his mind slam shut. He let me know that without some significant pre-existing public support of a particular point of view, political organizing is a complete and utter waste of time.
What was he going on about? I know from reading history a great many initially unpopular ideas have become "conventional wisdom" and "public policy" only after years of public education and organizing. People argued for decades---if not hundreds of years---before slavery was outlawed. Tommy Douglas also had to spend years and years arguing for socialized medicine before it was created. (Doctors initially hated it so much that they went on strike---now they all love it.)
It has taken decades to articulate, but I've lately come to the conclusion there are two different ways of doing politics. The first one is idealistic and it all boils down to describing a better future and educating voters about it so they will want to change the way society works. The second one is pragmatic and it boils down to figuring out some way to massage the status quo in order to get yourself some power.
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| Lincoln Alexander, image c/o Toronto Public Library |
This isn't to say that being pragmatic is necessarily a bad thing. At its best, pragmatic politicians can be open to persuasion and will work with members of other parties if it suits their interests. (Alexander was willing to break ranks with the Conservative caucus at times and vote with the Liberals if he felt it was important---such as when he voted for the creation of hate speech legislation.)
Unfortunately, at their best pragmatists don't tend to think about issues from a systemic point of view. For example, you won't get much deep thinking about the role of unlimited economic growth in the destruction of the planet's ecosystem from pragmatic politicians---even if they might be willing to vote for a carbon tax if it's popular enough with their base.
At its worst, though, you get people like Mitch McConnell who will say or do whatever it takes to get into or stay in public office. The Republican party in the USA is filled with people like this---which is why most of it's caucus have totally debased themselves in their fawning loyalty to Donald Trump and are moving heaven-and-earth to limit many (mostly brown-skinned and/or urban) people's opportunity to vote.
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| Erin O'Toole, image c/o Wikimedia |
This was a real slap in the face of O'Toole because he believes that the only way that the Conservatives will ever form a government is if the Party starts to embrace more popular policy planks. The problem is that the overwhelming majority of Canadians want the government to deal with the Climate Emergency, and the Conservatives have positioned themselves as the party of deniers. Check out this 2019 graphic from The Conversation that illustrates how much support there is for action on the Climate Emergency. (Click on the image for a clearer version.)
So O'Toole has decided that after years of supporting a party that repeatedly campaigned against dealing with the Climate Emergency, it's time to "retool" and embrace the issue because it's obvious that they will never be able to win a majority without doing so.
This is what pragmatic politicians would call "the Etch-A-Sketch maneuver". It's gets its name from the old-fashioned children's toy where you could draw a picture and erase it simply by shaking the screen.
The idea is that you can tell the members of your party any sort of silly nonsense to get elected leader or secure a local nomination on the assumption they will just "suck it up" when you do a 180 degree turn afterwards. It's one of the classic political games. The problem is, however, that the rubes sometimes actually start to believe the garbage you have been shovelling at them. Then you can't reset their belief system as easily as you can erase an Etch-A-Sketch. And because politicians like O'Toole don't "get" that a lot of grass-roots Conservatives actually believe the dangerous nonsense people like him have been peddling for years, they get stuck with "bozo eruptions" and "insurrections" like the vote by delegates denying the Climate Emergency.
O'Toole's failure to lead his party out of climate denial and the violent attack on the US Congress show the problem with treating politics like a game. It tends to give control of the party to the most ruthless and duplicitous members of the political class (ie: Donald Trump and Stephen Harper). And the games that these particular type of politicians play tends to whip up the most gullible members of the population into a frenzy that means that they become at best impossible to reason with and at worst violent.
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People become fixated on the short term and winning elections. But the fact of the matter is that you can be enormously successful at changing your society without being a "winner" at the game of politics. If you doubt me, consider the biography of Stephan Dion. He was the leader of the Liberal Party, but he wasn't elected Prime Minister. So he's a loser, right?
Not really. He was a university professor in Montreal who was brought to the attention of Prime Minister Chretien by his wife, Aline. The Liberal leader was so impressed that he talked Dion into running in a safe riding whereupon he was appointed the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs. At that point he became the Liberal point man for unravelling the separatist movement in Quebec. He did this very efficiently through a public education campaign plus "The Clarity Act", which suggested to ordinary voters in "la Belle Province" they were being profoundly misled by separatist politicians. This was tremendously successful and basically took the air out of the tires of the movement to leave Confederation.
So chalk up ending the Quebec separatist movement to Stephan Dion.
After this success Dion was elected leader of the Liberals. At which point he started working on the other big issue that concerned him: climate change. He worked at the Paris Climate agreement negotiations. He also helped create an entire government platform based upon the use of carbon pricing mechanisms (ie: carbon taxes) that would encourage both individuals and businesses to slowly wean themselves off fossil fuels.
In contrast, the Conservatives under Harper built their brand around fighting against any programs that would actually deal with the Climate Emergency. They were especially antagonistic towards carbon pricing and attacked Dion as a weakling who wasn't "good enough" to be the leader of Canada.
In the above Conservative campaign advertisement Dion is framed as a whiny, ineffectual, egg-head who just "isn't worth the risk".
But look now at the current political situation. The overwhelming majority of Canadians now believe that the Climate Emergency is real, and, we have carbon pricing across the country. In contrast, Stephen Harper's "realistic and pragmatic" policy of building Canada's economy on exporting tar sands oil has turned out to be yet another failed Albertan "get rich quick" scheme.
Here's the big takeaway that I want to leave in people's minds. It is possible to be really successful during elections and end-up having no real legacy for future generations. I suspect that Steven Harper will prove to be one of these people. It's also possible to be considered a total failure in polices---like Stephan Dion---and yet have done an enormous amount of good for ordinary citizens. And what separates the two can often be the way they viewed what they were doing. Is politics a game played by pragmatists? Or is it public service done by idealists?
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Some good points!
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