What is at Stake in an Election?
The
ritual of voting is about parties and policies and the will of the populace to
be sure but it is also about something even more fundamental which is
legitimacy. If we cannot have free and fair elections then we have a crisis of
legitimacy where people duke it out over who is ‘really’ king with each side
having its own narrative about legitimacy which it believes fervently. Anyone
curious about this may read Shakespeare’s always shockingly relevant histories
or for that matter John Ford’s Perkin
Warbeck whose hero is a man who has absolutely persuaded himself that he is
one of the young princes murdered by Richard III. He opposed and ultimately
killed by a man, Henry VII, whose secret anxiety is that he may NOT be the real
king either. The democratic solution to this is to have elections governed by a
legal process allowing the peaceful transfer of power from one group of party
interests to the next. This assumes that all parties will play by the rules for
the most part though all will push for advantage as far as the law allows and
often just a bit (but not too far) beyond (I was once a scrutineer on the
lookout for the standard dirty tricks!). This agonistic framework is rather
like sport where the two sides oppose each other but on the presupposition that
each will accept the outcome. Of course the social basis of this is that each
side agrees on a minimal sense of what constitutes good governance that allows
each party to submit in turn to the rule of the other. To be blunt: each side
has an agreement that whoever is in power will not ‘go rogue’ so that the rule
of the other is an annoyance but not an existential threat.
In
Canada for instance it has usually be assumed that right wing parties will not
TOO vigorously attack certain social programs while left wing parties will not
annoy TOO MUCH financiers in Toronto and Montreal. This consensus usually
results in the rule of the centrist party which will do the usual favors for
corporations but not take food directly from the mouths of children or force
people to pay tens of thousands for a broken bone. There has been in Canada
then a rough consensus about the good that allows for a party system to
operate. The one crucial thing that makes this work is the control of rhetoric
and the assumption of civility. The other party is not a horde of demons who
must be opposed at all costs but gentlemen and gentlewomen like ourselves.
There is much that is delusory in this but like Marie Antoinette’s gown they
are necessary illusions if the system is to work. We have to believe the system
holds the greatest number of competing in balance to accept the sharing of
power necessary to a democracy.
What I
wrote above is probably nostalgia for this is precisely what is vanishing or
has vanished in North America. I once heard an interview with Alberta
conservative Ted Byfield and anyone who knows me can attest that I am as far
from an Alberta conservative as it is possible to be. Yet he said one thing
clearly and correctly when asked about his beliefs on abortion. He said that in
a democratic society rational people can disagree about core ethical issues.
His right, his only right he said, was to state his case and argue his
position. If by due process his position did not prevail he said he was honor
bound to accept the result. This is exactly how a democracy should work: people should passionately
argue their positions yet when a decision is made commit to respect the result.
The ‘winners’ should also accept the result. By this I mean they should respect
the process by which the decision was reached and respect the part their
opponents played in reaching it. This means that the first step after ‘winning’
a crucial social argument is not retroactive punishment or humiliation of the
losers. All winners must take their win and go home and NOT try to rub noses in
the dirt by say, having prizes retracted from certain scholars or hazing people
on radio and t.v. Of course this only works to the extent that political issues
are not existential issues: if disagreements about the good are too fundamental
no one will regard the outcome as fair and everyone will try to subvert the
system in favor of their point of view. One conclusion one might draw from this
is that the conditions under which a democracy can successfully operate may be
rarer than we think.
The
problem is that the deeper the existential gulf between one party and another the
more likely it is that each will simply demonize the other and demons, unlike
persons, must be opposed at all costs by any means necessary. Each side will be
convinced that there is something so
deeply wrong with the other that the other must somehow be permanently
barred from power. Further, the other is outside the circle of civility and
respect. In this scenario positions actually harden around the extremes and
each side begins living up to the caricature of the other. Gun nuts become
bigger gun nuts when faced with existential opposition! This is what has
happened with evangelicals and other religious conservatives in the United
States. What makes a conservative Catholic leaf through the pages of Aquinas’ De Regno and say ‘Ah yes Trump!”. Not
Aquinas that’s for sure. He has defined the progressive other as demonic so
that between Clinton or Biden and Trump there is literally no choice! Trump is merely humanly bad while Clinton, and
her party, is demonically bad. This means he cannot accept the rule of the
other party under any circumstances because
its vices are not those of ordinary humans but are an existential threat to him
and all he represents. Defining himself so sharply in this way will of course
make HIM a demon to the other whose appearances on campuses must be picketed or
cancelled. This contempt will be met by an even more ferocious self-assertion
and soon our reader of Aquinas will be musing out loud on closing polling
stations or subverting the post office to prevent the electorate from making
yet another tragic error. Worse, the ‘other’ will begin to muse secretly or not
so secretly about applying the same techniques to him. Each side will begin the
inevitable process of living up to the worst suspicions of the other.
Our
Catholic friend though has one thing in common with the Evangelicals whose
theology is suddenly not heretical because he and they now have a common enemy.
This is their common will to revenge. They are past thinking that any power of
reason or persuasion can persuade a sufficient plurality of Americans that
abortion and homosexuality are as immoral as they think. This, for them, is a
deep cultural wound and their purpose now is to ‘own libs’. They want revenge
on the society in which this was possible and the form of that revenge is
willful and knowing support for an incompetent and literally insane president
who will simply burn the now hated ‘no longer great’ nation down through greed
and stupidity.[1] In
the process he will mispronounce words like ‘Belgium’ to the delight of anyone
who has ever mispronounced the name of a foreign country. This again is because
Trump is humanly incompetent and insane while any democratic rival is
demonically so simply by being a member of that party. Thus are institutions
and norms shredded like paper not because I think change will result (I’ve
given up on that) but because I want the other side to weep bitter tears. If I
can’t have the nation no one can.
There
may be no preventing this dynamic because there may be no preventing
existential differences deep enough to trigger it. It is naïve progressivism to
think that ‘science and education’ will counteract the human tendency to
splinter on issues of existential ‘all or nothing’ concern. Nor will the
‘losers’ ever fulfill the liberal fantasy that they will all just go home and
cry in their beer especially if the victory of ‘progress’ is accompanied by
gloating, contempt and retroactive
demonization. No set of procedural or constitutional frameworks can protect a
society when basic bonds of civility are lost for then all efforts will be
devoted to manipulating the rules opportunistically for the sake of ‘ultimate
victory.’
I don’t think
things are much different in Canada: the same rot exists in the slower, politer
forms we have mastered. This is evident enough from the recent assassination
attempt on the Prime Minister. This is NO surprise to anyone who monitors
conservative banter. Trudeau is, to be frank, an ordinary politician with ordinary vices
who falls into garden variety scandals of the sort which have plagued Canadian
politics forever. Read Archibald Lampman’s satirical poems on Canadian
politicians from the 1890’s and you will see Trudeau and the rest of the gang
in living color. For the CPC base though Trudeau is literally a demon. He is a
Muslim for instance who supports ISIS terror and is personal friends with Omar
Khadr. He is also a godless socialist and an atheist. When I pointed out the
apparent contradiction of this to a CPC supporter I was told that Trudeau was
also too stupid to know the difference! This discourse will slowly and
inevitably prime a large chunk of the electorate to conclude that our elections
too are fraudulent and that there can be no legitimate transfer of power all sides
will recognize. How can we have an election when even the blandly centrist and
mediocre liberals are controlled by Islam!
Speaking
of the blandly centrist Liberals, though, whoever thought it good for Canadian
democracy to use the words ‘abortion’ and ‘summer jobs’ in the same sentence
must be sent to the woodshed for that has energized the Canadian tin hats like
no other liberal decision. I know this by talking to them. The demonization of ‘rednecks’
and the worry that a teenager who paints a fence may not have progressive
social views will have disastrous consequences for any version of progressivism
that is serious about winning. This is because rural alienation could be a powerful,
even a defining issue for the N.D.P and rural voters do not care what fence
painters think in the privacy of their own thoughts. If the N.D.P is ever to
win an election urban progressive voters must feel empathy for rural voters who
they perceive as unevolved and benighted on basic issues of morality. They must
resist the temptation to say ‘to hell with those people who made my teen years
miserable’ though that may be humanly impossible to the hurt and embittered. Still,
life is not easy and decisions are hard and a progressivism that wants to win
in a permanent, as opposed to temporary way, must swallow its hurt and its pride.
To make victory permanent one must forestall reaction and revenge by preserving
the dignity of the other. Neo-liberalism has abjectly failed to do this leaving an opportunity for the far right
but also for any left that is imaginative enough to seize it.
[1] I know
the Trump presidency sold itself on the basis of a myth of national revival but
frankly I don’t think his supporters really believe this. Most of them seem
ready to support him again and this is because he has triggered people Trump
voters feel despise them. There has been no national revival but revenge has
been delivered in spades and the basic promise of the Trump regime fulfilled.
The nihilistic despair of Trump voters is, I think, a stunning condemnation of
the neo-Liberal order.
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