Why Political Parties Are Important

Last Monday there was a joint news conference by Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott. They both said that they were still interested in being members of Parliament, but weren't interested in being members of political parties. Instead, they want to run as, and, if elected, sit as independents.

Jody Wilson-Raybould,
Photo by Erich Saide, image c/o Wiki Commons.

I took the trouble to watch Raybould's entire press conference on YouTube, and I have to admit that I wasn't impressed. I thought most of what she said consisted just of empty platitudes, but there were a few things that "jumped out" at me. I thought I'd take the time to "deconstruct" them for my readers, and in doing so explain why I was so disappointed.

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There is less room for partisanship in our evolving democracy.

The thing about the word "partisan" is that it really just means "someone who supports a particular point of view". If you are totally against "partisanship", you are ultimately against basing your politics on anything but immediate expediency. (That's the expressed viewpoint of Donald Trump when he says "he's a "deal maker".) I find it pretty hard to believe that this is what Raybould means. In fact, it's pretty obvious to me that she's a "partisan" in favour of her own particular way of wanting to do politics, as opposed to some other type. Reading between the lines, I might assume that what she means is that she's opposed to party loyalty based exclusively superficial reasons. But I'd suggest that that is not a fair understanding of why the various members of the Liberal party do what they do.

As an independent I will be truly free to take the guidance of the citizens of Vancouver Granville and to represent you. I will not have to try and convince myself that just because the way it has always been done means that it must continue to be done this way.

A lot of politicians make noises about "taking the guidance" of the citizens, but that's pretty much an empty slogan. That's because it is enormously difficult and expensive to scientifically poll an entire riding in order to find out what people really do think about an issue. It's certainly not enough to just listen to the people who call your office on the phone, write you emails, or, show up at town halls---all of those avenues are easily manipulated by organized campaigns to sway leaders. As Liz Sandals stated when I interviewed her, she could read letters and emails from constituents where the same few talking points repeatedly came up over and over again---which indicates that they had been organized by some sort of organization (party, church, website, etc) to push a specific agenda. How exactly is listening to these campaigns an improvement over supporting a party's agenda?

Moreover, people's opinions are pretty much worthless unless they are informed. We have lots of folks spewing misinformation like "vaccines cause autism". What if a majority of the phone calls to her constituency office supported a ban on measles vaccination? Would Raybould "take the guidance" of her voters and vote in favour? Or would she follow her conscience and the best evidence that has been presented to her? Isn't part of the problem we face as a society that there are entrenched interests who have learned to effectively use propaganda to get people to do things (like denying climate change) that are objectively not in their own interest? Where What does Raybould's "principled stance" mean in this situation?

And that last sentence (I will not have to try and convince myself that just because the way it has always been done means that it must continue to be done this way.) seems to imply that the only reason MPs won't support whatever it is she is proposing is because of some sort of inertia. Does she really believe this? Or is this just another partisan smear---but one that favours her worldview instead of another's?

Before 2015 I'd never been involved in federal or provincial politics and I'd never been a member of a political party. My leadership experience before running to be your MP has been in the indigenous world. Advocating for transformation in the relations with indigenous peoples. As some of you know, in my cultural teachings, we strive to work though consensus. While there are a diversity of views, tensions and challenges, we do not entrench them in political parties. And we often frown on personal ambition. 

She freely admits that she has absolutely zero experience in parliamentary politics. She hasn't even had a membership in any political party. And yet, she ran and was immediately made the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. Then she had a disagreement with the head of her party, and made a big stink over something. She got kicked out of the caucus and now wants to tell all the other politicians how they really should act.

This reminds me of a sort of fundamentalist preacher I used to hear during my childhood in "Jesusland". They used to go on and on about how awful they'd been and all the terrible life choices they'd made before they found Jesus. But now they had him in their hip pocket and they wanted everyone else do what they said they should do---specifically because of their past history of making bad choices. When I heard this, the immediate thing I thought was that it all boiled down to "I made lots of horrible life choices in the past, and now I want you to follow my latest one".

The situation isn't exactly the same. But I am concerned about her reference to "consensus". The thing about that ideal is that it gives enormous power to whomever wants to veto and prevent something from happening, but precious little to anyone who wants to do anything. Moreover, it also involves ferocious battles over who gets to define what the "status quo" is, and what is "innovation" (ie: that thing that is easily vetoed.)

The commitment to consensus, the importance of speaking the truth, and striving to honour and uphold each other. These are the core values of my culture and teachings. 

The big issue is deciding what exactly "the truth" is, and what does it mean to "honour and uphold each other"?

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These are the ultimate questions, aren't they? I often meet people who think it is remarkably easy to identify the "truth" of any problem. Generally, if they let me, I find after asking a few questions that they really don't know very much at all. This is what is known as "Socratic questioning", and it's the basis of philosophy and science. (I was dealing with it in my last editorial Truth is a Conversation.)

One of the things you learn by being in a political party (and I was for many years) is that there are a great many different ideas about "the truth" and it is tremendously difficult to create any sort of consensus about what it might be. And if you want to work together as a group towards a common purpose---be it winning an election or preventing runaway climate change---it is tremendously difficult to create a process where everyone feels "honoured" and "upheld".

It's not only a question of people having different points of view, it's also that no matter where you are in the "party food chain", you simply cannot be involved in every decision that directly affects you. The party leadership consists of many people who are all tremendously busy with the demands of government business, party business, dealing with the media, meeting with community leaders, constituents, and, preparing for the next election. And when you do get a chance to bring your concerns to someone, they have to consider how a specific decision will seem to people who don't know what you know, and who live in totally different circumstances. Moreover, all the people you deal with are human beings who get sick, are tired, are under stress, who are carrying baggage from their childhood----who basically make just as many stupid mistakes as everyone else. In fact, being in a political party is much like being in a giant, fractious, crazy family.

You have to have a thick skin and be tremendously aware of the frailties inherent in the human condition to be successful in politics. You also have to learn that "The perfect is the enemy of the good".  And the key thing you have to learn is that you cannot work with a group if your bring to it the attitude of "My way or the highway". 

If Jody Wilson-Raybould had been involved in the Liberals for any length of time she would realize how incredibly hard it is to "get along" with a huge number of people who have different personal histories, different points of view, and, different life situations. It's not a trivial thing to do. But if you can manage to do it, you are doing something of great importance to society. You are working with an institution that "stitches together" the nation and forges some sort of common worldview that can make things "work". It does this by creating a mechanism where people can get together and make the compromises that are necessary if people are going to live together---not in harmony, but at least without burning the house down. That's why we have political parties. 

I don't want to sound too harsh, but in the light of my experience in politics, I couldn't help but think that her entire 15 minute press conference was just a lot of empty verbiage that meant pretty much nothing at all. Indeed, it reminded me of an episode of the sitcom Cheers that I'd seen years ago. I found a scene from it on YouTube. Take a look and see if it rings "true" to you.

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One last point. Elizabeth May approached Raybould with a suggestion that she join the Green Party. That was, IMHO, a perfectly acceptable solution to both her and Philpott's situation. It is very difficult to get elected as an independent for purely practical reasons. It might seem that the two MPs would find themselves a better "fit" in the Green caucus anyway.

But then May said something in an interview that was absolutely extra-ordinary. She said that she would step aside and let Raybould run for the leadership of the party---presumably with her endorsement. In effect, she was treating the party leadership like her own private possession that she was free to give away to someone else. I mentioned how appalled I was by this at a breakfast meeting and someone immediately piped up and said how hard May works, and how committed she is to the environment. Luckily someone else immediately replied for me by saying that it was possible to be hard working and committed, and still have a tremendously wrong-headed view of leadership at the same time. (That allowed me to keep my powder dry.)

Elizabeth May is also someone who'd never been involved in the Green Party before she became leader. As it transitions away from her being the only elected member of Parliament, I suspect that there are going to be internal battles as something like an "internal culture" begins to grow within the Green Party of Canada. Just remember that this isn't a betrayal of anyone's ideals---it's just a symptom of childhood's end and a movement towards developing an adult point of view. I do, however, wish people would get rid of the "star candidate" complex that parachutes people into high public office with absolutely zero experience in political parties, though. 

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This week I saw a twitter rant from Adam Donaldson about how hard it is to get people to support indie media in the city. He made the perfectly reasonable point that if 1,000 people did a two dollar a month subscription to Guelph Politico, he'd have the sort of financial independence that would allow him cut a great deal of stress out of his life. Indeed, he said he was on the verge of calling it quits because it's so hard to get support from the community. I could say much the same thing. What triggered this was a complaint by someone who missed the good old days of the Guelph Mercury.

Well, I wrote a column for three years at the old Merc, and those days weren't really all that good. And I too get a bit miffed when I hear nostalgic whining about how great it was when a pile of dead trees that had been bled dry by corporate vampires like Conrad Black was delivered to your door every day. For a very long time before it died, it was a dreadful paper. And it cost a great deal more than $2/month too. We have well over 100,000 people in this city. If people had the idea that they need to pay for local news just like anything else, and were willing to pay a trivial amount of money through a Patreon subscription, we'd have a thriving independent local news culture in this city. But you've got to actually do it. 

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Furthermore, I say to you---climate change must be dealt with!

Identity Politics

Years ago there was a big debate among the very small number of people who actually care about "big debates". It centred around whether activism should be put into "single issues" or "political organizing". That is to say, in the grand carnival of society the question raised was whether it was better to organize demonstrations, mount petition drives, fundraise, issue press releases, and, so on for one specific social issue, like wage discrimination against women; or; whether it would be make more sense to put all that effort into building a political party that would fight for that issue plus others like ending carding, gay rights, unions, higher minimum wages, fighting climate change, etc. No one talks about "single issue politics" anymore (mainly because people have learned that it is possible to "walk and chew gum at the same time"), but the discussion continues in a slightly different form in arguments for or against "identity politics".

What distinguishes this new iteration from the old one is that the focus of organizing isn't on the specific social problem---such as police violence---but instead on a specific, sub-group of the population, such as blacks, and their unique experience of the problem, as in the "Black Lives Matter" movement. The argument being that white people have such a profoundly different experience with authority over their lives that you simply cannot understand the problem without actually having lived it yourself as a person of colour.

Public Domain photo by Johnny Silvercloud, c/o Wiki Commons

This change in focus can be threatening to people who are not members of that specific group because it seems to be arguing from a position of "privilege". That is to say, for example, if you simply cannot understand a significant aspect of policing unless you are a black civilian, it feels to some that your point-of-view as a police officer (or white civilian) simply doesn't count. 

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To political organizers (ie: those folks who see the "big picture" and want to build political parties), identity politics is really scary and dangerous. This is because the classic way that populations are manipulated and controlled is through "divide and conquer" tactics. For example, racism has traditionally been a wonderful thing to use against poor whites---because if you could convince a lot of them that they were so much better off than people of colour they would believe that they had a "stake" in the system. And if you identify with the people exploiting you, you don't want to change things.  

Unfortunately, however, understanding the danger of "divide and conquer" doesn't alter the fact that some fractions of the population simply do not have the same experience as others. The vast majority of men have no idea at all about what it's like to be sexually harassed. Most whites have no idea what it's like to be "carded" or stopped by the police for "driving while black". Nor do heterosexual people have any understanding of what it's like to go through life being gay or trans. And the really important thing to remember is that while something like being "carded" or harassed because of your sexual orientation is a totally incidental and minor thing in the life of people that it almost never happens to---it is a huge, big deal if it is a routine part of your life. And because of this tremendous difference in the perception of importance, it has tended to be extremely easy for organizations like political parties, unions, etc---who have tended to be overwhelmingly composed of white, straight men---to simply "bargain away" any movement on these "lifestyle" issues when "more important" stuff like tax rates, minimum wages, base salary, etc, came up for negotiation. This is why groups have recently started to mobilize around the sub-population instead of the issue, and focused on the single issue instead of the broader, political party.

The "divide and conquer" tactic has been attempted, and it has met with mixed results. Some police unions and elements of the Republican party have tried to create a "blue lives matter" campaign to divide people who are concerned about the problems police officers face from the people who are concerned about the problems of blacks---and pit one against the other.  

Public Domain photo by Daniel Oines, c/o Wiki Commons
Image has been cropped by Bill Hulet

This has managed to develop some traction, as the sign above would indicate. In contrast, an earlier attempt to divide divide blacks and gays over same-sex marriage (using appeals to conservative black churches), seems to have fizzled out before it actually got any momentum. Primarily, this happened because the black population is more sensitive to "civil rights" than the general public. They seemed more interested in helping others gain rights that they had to fight for themselves than they disliked gays. (There are still inter-racial couples alive who were forbidden to marry under the old Jim Crow laws. The parallel with laws forbidding gay marriage were obvious to many.) 

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There is an element to identity politics that scares a great many folks. Once you start looking at the world this way there is a danger that it can become a bit of a Pandora's Box---the identities will start to multiply to the point where there will no longer be any sort of majority left. Just to illustrate with my own example, consider the following. I'm a straight, white male. But I'm also someone who grew up in a poor, working class family. I'm a union member in what is considered a good place to work. But I've always worked at physical labour and as a result, various parts of my body have been damaged in ways that cause me considerable pain (arthritis, tendinitis, sciatica.) Moreover, I am married to a woman who has a psychiatric illness that has kept her from being employed for a large part of her adult life. Moreover, I am planning on sponsoring her to come live with me as an immigrant (she's an American citizen.) Also, I am a survivor of an abusive, dysfunctional family, and, as a result, suffer from PTSD. 

Any one of these issues could become something I identify with and see as being key to who I am. I could go on about class discrimination, the casually brutal way people treat the mentally ill, the way managers routinely ask people to do jobs that wear and tear on the body without bothering to think about the cumulative impact that this has over a person's lifetime, and, so on. But the fact of the matter is that compared to many others, I'm doing pretty good. And I understand that---just like everyone else---I have to pick and choose my battles. As a result, I've made it a practice to try to identify my struggles through issues instead of identity. I am not about to cast aspersions on others who emphasize their own specific experience even though I choose to emphasize the value of seeing things within a larger context. We all bring different experiences and gifts to the table, and diversity is generally a strength instead of a liability.

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This raises one last point. 

It's a natural thing to always try to generalize from our own personal experience in order to understand someone else. For example, I was able to scrimp and save, put together a down payment, and, buy my own house---even though it was a slum and I had to gut and rebuilt it over 20 years. So what's stopping someone else? Well, lots of people didn't grow up on farms and learn that they can do just about anything if they put my mind to it. Moreover, houses cost a lot more now than they used to---even slums. I know this stuff logically, but it is still emotionally easy for me to forget about it. How can I avoid making similar judgments about someone else? 

What I try to do is remember the following statement: "I may think I know what that person's life is like---but I really don't. So the rational, the kind, the enlightened thing is to simply suspend judgment. Maybe I will be able to learn a little bit about that person's life, but until then I will just take what they say on its own terms." I know that it's really difficult to remember to suspend judgment, but when you can it is useful to try. And if you continue to try, after a while it becomes easier and easier to do. And at that point you begin to start to listen to what the other person is saying and you also start to lose any resentment you might feel towards granting that person anything that you might have once thought of as being "special privileges".