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.        

                  

           

 

 

 

 

 

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[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.