Why democracy doesn’t need a white knight
BY ANDREW POTTER, OTTAWA CITIZEN
JANUARY 3, 2014
By all accounts, it was a bad year for Canadian politics. Indeed, “A bad year in politics” was the headline on the year-end wrap-up in the Citizen’s editorial pages. According to a recent article on CBC.ca, “old-fashioned honour” went missing from politics in 2013. From the Chronicle Herald: 2013 was “the year that politics hit rock bottom.”
There certainly was plenty of scandal and malfeasance. The gas plants scandal in Ontario. The Senate spending scandal that has ruined four senators’ careers and engulfed the PMO. The ongoing work of performance art that is Rob Ford’s mayoralty.
But if bad behaviour was the villain that dishonoured the virtue of Canadian democracy in 2013, late in the year, a white knight appeared on the scene in the form of Conservative MP Michael Chong’s Reform Act.
The despair over the state of our politics is certainly warranted, but the near-desperate hope for a solution in parliamentary reform is not. Chong’s private member’s bill is yet another iteration of a perennial theme in our political discourse, which is for people to assume that if they don’t like what the system serves up, there must be something wrong with the system.
And so while the Reform Act might have stirred the souls of Canadians looking for something to power-wash the stain of the past year from our memories, the truth is we need the Reform Act like we need more cold weather.
Here is a naïve view of how politics works:
Politics is about policy. Groups of like-minded people coalesce around a set of ideas about how the world should work. This group is called a party. The party puts forth a platform of policies that will put those ideas into action. The role of the party then is to serve as the interface where ideas become policies. To gain power, the party promotes and sells these policies to the public as better than those of their opponents.
Thus, the adversarial nature of politics is essentially a debate between superior policies, and an election campaign is when the marketplace of ideas is open for business. It is like a graduate seminar in philosophy, where ideas are freely debated and truth will win out, whatever its source. When the party with the best ideas wins, and its policies are then implemented, the country as a whole is better off.
On the naïve view, the crucial trait of a successful politician is that he is intelligent. Political leaders should be smart people, policy wonks, charismatic academics, philosopher kings who will rule in the interest of all. The model naïve politician is someone like Pierre Trudeau, or Barack Obama.
Here is a cynical view of how politics works:
Politics has nothing to do with policy, it is about power. Joining a political party is not like joining a faculty club, it is more like joining a tribe or a gang. The party’s overriding function is to gain power and relative status for their group at the expense of people in other tribes and gangs.
Therefore, a party platform is not a list of policies seen as being in the objective interest of the country. Rather, it is a statement of brand affiliation, or, more simply, identity. The function of the party is to sell its brand or identity as more appealing than that of their opponents. Policies are implemented because of how they appeal to the group and promote its identity.
In this view, elections are basically popularity contests, not much different from the process of voting for class presidents. So the point of an election is to make one tribe’s leader seem more appealing than those of the other tribes.
For cynics, to govern is to choose between competing interest groups. There will be winners and losers, with some groups inevitably rising and dropping in status. This is because power is indivisible and rival. One group can only hold it at the expense of others.
The best politicians are charismatic figures, or gang leaders. They are polarizing figures, ruthless at pursuing the interests of their tribe at the expense of others. Loved, or at least greatly admired by their followers, they are loathed by their opponents.
The successful cynical politician is not necessarily intelligent. What matters is that he is authentic. The relevant question is not “does he have good ideas” but rather “is he a proper representative of my tribe?” The model cynical politicians are men like Jean Chrétien, or George W. Bush.
But these terms don’t just describe how politics does work, they can also be used as a language in support of reform or in support of the status quo. We may think that our politics ought to be more cynical, or ought to be more naïve.
In fact, the most significant political divide in Canada is not between East and West, French and English, or left and right, but between those who are cynical and those who are naïve about politics. It informs almost all other opinions about how our political machinery — including Parliament, the courts, the party system, the electoral system, the media — should function.
A great many political arguments, perhaps most, are actually disguised disagreements over which mode of politics is better, the naïve or the cynical. Indeed, most apparently partisan disagreements are, if you scratch the surface, differences of opinion between cynics and naïfs.
To see how this habit of conflating partisan views with metapolitical commitments can lead us into trouble, we need only look at the contrasting treatment of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and the provincial Liberals under Kathleen Wynne.
In many ways, 2013 was no better for Wynne than it was for anyone else. The gas plants scandal won’t go away, the provincial auditor has repeatedly roasted her over her handling of the affair, manufacturing jobs are fleeing the province and the government’s books are in terrible shape. Meanwhile, Wynne continues to avoid facing a confidence vote in the legislature thanks to a preposterous rule that prevents the opposition from raising confidence issues without the government’s permission. Yet Wynne’s Liberals remain reasonably popular; at the very least, her ongoing presence in the premier’s chair is not seen as a repudiation of the very existence of standards in public office.
Then there is Ford. One of the most perplexing aspects of the Rob Ford story is the fact that he remains quite popular. As a recent Globe and Mail editorial lamented, as long as he remains unindicted, there is a very good chance Ford could be re-elected this year. This is, for his opponents, completely inexplicable on anything but the most cynical grounds. His supporters, the so-called Ford Nation, will vote for him under just about any circumstance because they are a tribe, and it is vital to membership in their tribe that they hate the urban elites.
Yet if you listen to what Ford’s supporters say, it isn’t quite as cynical as that. When Ford’s drinking, drug use, and abuse of office are raised as considerations for why he is unfit for office, the response isn’t always “so what?” Very often the answer his supporters give is something like: at least he didn’t nearly bankrupt the city, like his predecessor did. At least he didn’t cause the scandals at eHealth and Ornge, like the Liberals at Queen’s Park did. At least he didn’t cost the province a billion dollars and counting by terminating a couple of gas plants in the middle of an election, like Dalton McGuinty did.
When he was elected mayor, Ford’s main opponent was George Smitherman, the former McGuinty cabinet minister. As Peter Loewen argued in a column for the Citizen, Smitherman’s record was very weak, and it included the eHealth fiasco and “a hastily prepared green energy plan that unnecessarily enriched suppliers and grossly violated international trade agreements. The cost of this mismanagement certainly reached into the billions of dollars.” As Loewen concluded, “If Ford had no record, Smitherman had an indefensible one.”
For Ford supporters, the way urban voters continue to support the provincial Liberals, despite their mismanagement of the province’s finances, is equally perplexing. That most Wynne supporters miss this speaks to the degree to which most of us are blind to our own political biases.
The more sophisticated naïfs understand this, which is why they find it useful to state their case in the language of parliamentary reform.
Recall the familiar notion of the democratic deficit, which becomes a popular idea whenever a majority government gets a bit long in the tooth (e.g. third-term Jean Chrétien, current-term Stephen Harper) and the leader’s opponents start to wonder if he’ll ever leave.
A workable definition of the democratic deficit is the perception by naïfs of the inability of the system to keep the cynics in check. When it comes to proposals for remedying the democratic deficit, therefore, high on the list are things like relaxed party discipline, more “free votes” in the House of Commons, and the strengthening of bipartisan parliamentary committees to give MPs greater input into policy-making and the drafting and scrutiny of legislation.
This fall saw a remarkable addition to this list, in the form of Conservative MP Michael Chong’s Reform Act, which would remove the control of party leaders over local ridings, and provide a mechanism by which party caucuses — not party membership — could remove a leader. It was, claimed more than one observer, the single greatest opportunity to fix our democracy in a generation.
The problem with Chong’s bill is that it can’t possibly do anything close to what its supporters hope it will do. Chong’s bill is just another in a long line of proposed reforms to our political system, the achievement of which will give us True Democracy at last.
What all of these sorts of reforms (proportional representation is the Reform Act’s stablemate in the Magic Pony corral) have in common that the “fixes” they propose are rooted in a very specific, and highly naïve, account of politics as less about advancing specific interests and more about participating in some ongoing deliberative conversation.
The truth is politics is a messy and very unpleasant business, even at the best of times. It is very easy to look at what is going on and argue that the way things work is bad, and therefore any reform would be good. In contrast, making the argument for the status quo is hard. The system always seems broken, and it is easy to climb on the high horse of reform and ignore the fact that the answer to the question of whether an institution or a practice or a policy enhances democracy or inhibits it is often, “it depends.”
If the strong cynics are guilty of anything, it is in believing that politics is solely about gaining power, and using that power as the means to help your friends and harm your enemies. The strong naïfs are guilty of the exact opposite error: assuming that political power of any sort is inherently corrupting, and that it is possible to govern in the general interest without making hard choices about whose interests will be advanced and at whose expense.
The cynics are right about one thing though: Wielding political power is the starting point for doing anything at all, and the core feature of our political institutions is that they enable competition for political leadership. A healthy democracy provides a mechanism for evicting leaders who have outlasted their value to the nation, allowing elites to get cycled out once they have worn out their welcome. In the meantime, the best we can hope for from our democracy is one in which limited cynical means are deployed to achieve maximally naïve ends.
How close is Canada to this ideal? According to the near-consensus of the punditocracy, 2013 saw the Harper government reach the acme of political nihilism, where maximally cynical means are being used to achieve maximally cynical ends. Only a very few people seem to have noticed that, during his nearly eight years in power, Harper has kept his attention focused on a small set of policies that have, gradually and nearly imperceptibly, managed to change the country in a significant way, to the great approval of a large plurality of the electorate
Even so, the rumblings about Harper’s imminent departure are rising in lockstep with the grumblings from within his caucus about his leadership and the polls that show his party at levels that would see them lose their majority, if not power, in the next election. Like all political leaders, Stephen Harper will eventually either jump or he will be pushed. This is the sign of a democracy’s health, not its degeneracy.
The language of reform is the moral high ground of the sophisticated naïf. The language of the status quo is the language of the cynical exercise of power. And so it is not surprising to find that while naïfs are constantly trying to reform Parliament, cynics find themselves merely trying to defend it.
Andrew Potter is the editor of the Ottawa Citizen and the author of The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves.
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