Replicating Glory III: The Material Details, Research Time, 04/08/2017

How to revolutionize a society so densely layered with different classes, business and civil relationships, political parties, cultural communities, trade unions and associations.

You know what civil society is? Redundancy in the social networks of an entire country. It does for societies what redundancy structures do in electrical power grids and different server hubs of the internet.

Let’s contrast Czarist Russia during the First World War. There was only one way to inculcate a sense of loyalty to the Czarist state – fealty to the class hierarchy of the Russian aristocracy. Break the people’s faith in that, and you’ve got a nationwide civil uprising.

The progressive politics of mid-20th century Western liberalism
transformed Canada from a polite northern jewel in the crown of the
British Empire, into a culturally more independent country. The
cultural currents led into Canadian state politics by Lester Pearson
(liberal internationalism), Pierre Trudeau (personal liberty), and
Tommy Douglas (brotherhood) literally built the new national
ideology of the Canadian people.

Now look at a society like Canada today. We’re a democracy with regular elections and media highly critical of government. And we have plenty of media criticizing our oligarchical class. Reporting on corporate crime is a popular demographic.

We’re also highly multicultural and permit people to speak whatever language they want in their private lives, and worship freely as long as nobody gets hurt. There are many places in the world where this never happens.

My country is also built on terrible injustices, like the slow, creeping, institutional genocide of Indigenous people. That’s what the Canadian state was designed to do in 1867.

The liberal reforms of the Pearson-Trudeau-Douglas era of Canadian leadership made some major progress on the foundations of a plural society. My generation is on the verge of a similar step, overturning the popular racism against Indigenous Canadians. Like the 1964-84 social revolutions, Indigenous liberation will probably take at least that long.

We’re in year five, if you’re counting.

But look at what this happy, diverse, plural, democratic society has – so many ways to become loyal to the Canadian state. As Antonio Gramsci would say, so many ways I’m loyal to a capitalist power structure.

I just described the exact way I’m loyal to the Canadian state, or at least the institution of Canada. I’m not about to overthrow the state of Canada and its entire economic system, like Lenin in 1917. I’m ethically invested in Canada.

Canada today is facing another revolutionary pressure, just as the
country did in the 1960s. That's the movement for Indigenous
liberation and reparations. It will mean tearing down the last,
most brutal and cruel institutions of the British Empire in Canada:
the reserve system and Indigenous race laws. We'll need leaders of
the same mettle as Douglas, Pearson, and Trudeau Sr. Will Justin
Trudeau have the same fortitude?
I doubt it. Let me put it to you this way. I think the best modern
philosopher to use in understanding Justin Trudeau is Jean
Beaudrillard. Justin Trudeau: the world's first hyperreal PM.

That’s what I mean about redundancy. There are so many different ways to be loyal to Canada that someone like me can exist peacefully with someone like the arch-nationalist, army-worshipping, neo-Loyalist Stephen Harper. He didn’t have to kill me to take power. I’m just in the NDP.

Back in Russia in 1917, the only way you could ethically invest yourself in Czarist Russia was to be loyal to the Czar and subservient to the landed aristocracy. One quick strike in a weak moment and the whole structure could fall to pieces.

If one path to ethical investment in multicultural democratic Canada falls apart, there are still plenty of other routes for the country to earn people’s loyalty. That’s why you need a ‘war of position’ in Gramsci’s terminology.

You need to be a strategist, exploring and analyzing each of these routes of loyalty to Canada. You have to look at each path to a person’s ethical investment in the country and the way things are (or could be with tweaks). Their structure, and their dynamics – the ways in which those loyalties can change but remain strong.

An activist and an ethnographer. A philosopher’s critical eye on ideology with an expert communicator’s power to make people of all stripes understand it. A social scientist who’s also an ambitious experimenter in society. That’s what you have to be to win the ‘war of position.’

That’s a bit of a tall order for a resumé. I think I can understand why this has not been very successful. That’s why Gramsci seems like such a pessimist, I guess.

Will the Liberal Finally Die or Regenerate? Research Time, 29/11/2016

Life has gotten a bit busy, so my Class review will be late by a day or two. Judging by Phil Sandifer’s review of the episode, I’m not missing on much artistically, but it will probably be a fascinating shit show of crazy ideas flying all over the place.

Such things have their place in science-fiction, and in the world of Doctor Who as well.

But today, I want to follow on from yesterday’s post about the CBC controversy brewing. Right now, Canada is experiencing a white nationalist movement, just as in Trump’s triumph in America and the growing movements in Europe.

You might not think so because of Justin Trudeau’s leadership. How can there be a resurgence of political racism in Canada when we re-elected the party with contemporary multiculturalism at its core, led by a fresh-faced social progressive?

Canadian Liberal Party rhetoric challenges the destructive, conservative
tendencies of our society, while falling in line with those tendencies in
their governance and actions. With every generation, the party has to
work hard to find a new way to pull the same old slight of hand. Justin
is the regeneration that continues the traditional theme.

My answer reveals a lot about the decadence and the promise of liberalism as an ethic and a political philosophy. It’ll just take a few paragraphs to work through.

Justin Trudeau himself is a frightfully normal Liberal Party politician. He campaigned as a standard-bearer for social progressivism and institutional change to the Canadian state after the paranoid doldrums of the Harper decade. He’s ended up a new mix on traditional Liberal Party hypocrisy, walking back all his promises that would actually change Canadian institutions and economic relationships.

Trudeau will dominate Canadian state politics for the next three years at least, probably longer. But the white nationalist movement has its own voice in federal politics in Kellie Leitch.

Canadian white nationalism is specific to the Canadian situation. But a white nationalist reactionary movement tends to emerge in response to a wave of activism for formerly excluded people to be included as full members of a society.

America’s largely revolves around the growing social clout of black and Hispanic minorities, and activists from those communities who seek material equality as people and as cultures.

The different European white nationalist movements respond to the demands of immigrant groups for inclusion. They first emerged when the groups were from the former colonies, but picked up popular speed when the mass influx of Muslim refugees from the three/four wars* of the Middle East began.

* The Libyan Civil War, the Saudi-Iran proxy war for control of Yemen, and depending on how you divide the conflict, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad, and the Syrian-Iraqi war on ISIS.

But we don't live in an era when traditional ways of thinking and acting
can maintain and defend our democracy and our freedoms. Modern
nationalism isn't the hoary old terror of Stormfront and greasy Hitler
hair. White nationalism's voices today are young, dynamic politicians
whose charisma could challenge Trudeau's own. Like Germany's
Franke Petry, leader of the Alternative for Deutschland Party, on
track to unseat the tired centrist-liberal Christian Democrat Party of
Angela Merkel.

All these white nationalist movements emerged and strengthened in reaction to social movements that challenged old and ancient racializing hierarchies in their societies.

In America, it was a renewed desire of the former slave class for social inclusion – the demand that black lives matter. In Europe, it was the demand of Muslim people to become Europeans, when Europe has been defined since the early second millennium in opposition to Islamic civilization.

Canada? I still have some work to do tracing the ideas, but my initial hypothesis is that Canada’s conservative culture started to embrace white nationalism in response to the Indigenous cultural renaissance. The Canadian state was founded – in part, but in essential part – as institutions to remove Indigenous people from political life.

Lock them away in reserves, in rural areas where no one goes. The first major crime of the Canadian state was the suppression of francophone Indigenous people in the first mass settling of the territories of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. State-sponsored genocide continued through the residential schools.

The last five years have seen the recognition of these crimes, and the growing visibility of continuing racism. When an elected official in Saskatchewan reacts to the murder of a young Indigenous man by declaring that the shooter should have killed all Colten Boushie's friends so there’d be no witnesses? He got in trouble, but he was speaking for his constituents.

Chantal Mouffe writes in praise of liberalism because of one important aspect of its philosophy – the possibility that everyone can be included in a society, no matter how different they are. That community can arise from difference, not from conformity to some common moral, religious, or ethnic being.

I may sound alarmist when I say this, but now is a time when alarmism
is entirely reasonable. As Canadians, we have to accept that a not
insignificant number of our fellow Canadians think it's not only
morally acceptable to kill Indigenous people, but that it's a national
imperative to suppress, marginalize, and drive Indigenous people to
their cultural and literal death.

In the wake of Trump’s election, there’s been a lot of chatter among self-identified liberals that maybe it’s time to move on from “identity politics.” To move away from provoking the white people who are threatened by the racially marginalized seeking inclusion.

Because mainstream liberalism sees racism as a matter of individual’s or group’s shared beliefs about people, it’s often blind to more structural material oppression. Yet liberalism’s drive to include difference requires confronting and changing those systematic institutional structures that perpetuate racializing inequities.

If liberalism and liberals accept and reconcile their politics with nationalism, liberal politics will die. If liberal thinkers and leaders find ways to fight nationalism – to welcome the different and find strength in that diversity and bravery in confronting fundamental structures in society? It will regenerate into a more powerful philosophy and a more peaceful world.

The Sad Essence of Harperism, Jamming, 07/02/2016

A lot of ink has spilled and data has streamed asking questions about what the hell Canada experienced in the last decade with Stephen Harper as Prime Minister. His priorities, methods, and ideals determined what the Canadian government did, for better according to some, and for much much worse according to others.

Understanding just what kind of a monster Stephen Harper was has been a major task for my country’s professional writers, journalists, and artists. We know that we were upset, we know the object of our anger, but I’m not sure that we could quite yet say in a single keen statement precisely what upset us.

We could go on and on, of course. Logically speaking, the most precise statements are actually the longest. The more detail you put into your statement and the more attention you pay to your words as you write them all down, the less room there is for misinterpretation.

And nothing will stand in his way.

I’ve read and produced plenty of this ink and data so far. Daniel Gutstein’s Harperism got a multi-post appearance on the blog, but I’ve tried wrapping my head around him plenty of times. 

I think I’ll actually make the Harper years a subject in the Utopias manuscript. It’ll have two purposes: 1) to reflect its position as a Canadian work, and 2) as a prominent example of the hypocritical conservatism that animates the contemporary Western right wing. 

A couple of Facebook friends posted an article by Michael Harris that I found remarkably insightful for two reasons. Harris described the essential priority of Harper’s government very clearly, so that it foregrounded its transformative power and its pettiness.

Harper was an epochal Prime Minister for Canada. There’s a before and after line in Canadian history, and Harper’s leadership is the transition inside that line. So writers can get pretentious as all fuck trying to define the Harper period of Canadian history. But as Harris describes, there’s a very simple idea animating it all.

Harper is an oil man.

Harper’s government did everything they could to develop the oil sands and its pipelines as fast as they physically could. The Conservative provincial government in Alberta had their backs the entire way. 

Harper hobbled or outright demolished every institution in the Canadian government that could slow down the pipeline approval and construction process. Harper government omnibus bills frequently included legislation that removed environmental protections for almost all of Canada. 

Compromise is for the weak. The strong crush their
opposition.

Harper’s silencing of any voice that could conflict with the interests of the Alberta oil industry even included restrictions on scientific research and freedom to speak and publish. Government-employed or funded ecological scientists couldn’t engage the public without direct, micro-managerial approval from the Prime Minister’s office. 

They also pulped huge chunks of government scientific archives and cut funding to all but those scientific projects that would aid oil development. 

More than just removing roadblocks, the Harper government sought to demonize and marginalize even democratic agencies like environmental organizations and citizens’ groups. This was behind their hostile tax audits of environmental charities, and why their public relations on the subject frequently lumped environmentalists with extreme violent terror groups. 

As Harris says, this hardball strategy backfired, as informal protests of Harper’s policies grew and grew. Indigenous people took their concerns over ecological destruction to the courts, and frequently won. The Canadian public, broadly speaking, grew tired of Harper’s own hostility to any criticism.

Admittedly Harper never had the opportunity to stack Canada’s courts fully in his favour. And his communication office demonized critics of the Conservatives to such an intensity that right-wing partisanship in Canada has become insane. 

Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister under the right-wing (but socially progressive) Liberal banner, still makes boosting the Alberta oil industry a priority. And it’s a higher priority in this time of political instability in many oil producing regions and cratering global crude prices. 

True victory is not about overcoming your opponents
through brute force. It's about making peace with them,
and so changing them, until you achieve what you
always wanted as easily as a dolphin swims through
a calm, placid sea.

It’s just that Trudeau recognizes that Harper’s polarizing support of the oil industry was a failure. And it failed because it alienated any possible public support from anyone who wasn’t already an enthusiastic petroleum partisan.

Justin Trudeau is the PR Prime Minister. It’s his greatest skill. And he’s going to use it to rebuild the public support for oil industry expansion and export that Harper’s uncompromising support of the oil industry destroyed.

A lot of Harper supporters hate Justin Trudeau precisely because he takes a soft, conciliatory approach to opponents of the oil industry. They hate him because they think softness is a sign of weakness. Trudeau haters don’t understand that softness and conciliation is actually how you win allies and change minds.

Ruthless oil industry partisanship was the practical engine of Stephen Harper’s politics. It backfired because your opponent will respond in kind to a blackened eye. Justin Trudeau will probably achieve all the same economic and oil industry ascendence that Harper wanted. Kind words make opponents into friends. Friends of Big Oil across Canada.

The Election Takes Care of Itself, Jamming, 17/01/2016

I hope, the forty-fifth and first Jewish President of the
United States of America.

A friend and colleague of mine, T-Boz, recently went to work for the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire, and I got into a Twitter conversation about it this week with another colleague, Steve Fuller.

Fuller’s tweets are available to anyone who cares to look back at my mentions. But if I can summarize his criticisms, he was concerned that Sanders’ idealism and relative radicalism in America’s political context would make him a reiteration of George McGovern.

I understand his concern, but I do think the situation is very different. Actually, if you consider Steve’s current home of the UK, I find more similarities between McGovern and Jeremy Corbyn.

McGovern, like Corbyn, was an insurgent candidate who achieved the highest position in his party on the strength of a popular movement. McGovern was the spokesperson for the movement against the war in Vietnam, and Corbyn is England’s spokesperson for the anti-austerity movement.

The mass media story is that Corbyn is “unelectable.” The Murdoch-controlled media* of Britain attacks him so frequently that it’s made his fairly tame social democratic policies so unpalatable to the general electorate that he may as well be a Stalinist. But that’s not Corbyn’s biggest problem, as far as I’m concerned.

* As well as the BBC, paralyzed with fear at the prospect of David Cameron’s looming and inevitable catastrophic cuts and radical rewriting of the company charter.

No, Corbyn’s biggest problem is that the British party system invests a huge amount of power over policy in the hands of MPs, and district associations have virtually no power to recall or even critique a sitting MP. And Labour's parliamentary leadership today, like the American Democrats in the 1970s, is schizophrenically split over a catastrophic war: Iraq.

Hilary Benn was the Labour Party's foreign affairs
opposition critic when he stood up and proudly
endorsed Conservative PM David Cameron's bombing
of Daesh in Syria. The Labour Party's leader, Jeremy
Corbyn, laid the party's position clearly: Labour was
against further barely discriminate bombing. Benn won
praise from Britain's conservative media, but a
demotion and probably a broken friendship from
Corbyn himself. Deservedly.

That’s why Hilary Benn openly denounced Corbyn on the floor of parliament last month, enthusiastically supporting the mass bombing of Syria, despite the huge amount of civilian casualties that would result. Most Labour MPs refuse to admit that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, even though their leader has always been against violent military intervention.

So what about Sanders? Well, Sanders’ messages – against Wall Street criminality, the corruption of lobbyist-greased electoral and legislative politics, war, racism, poverty, and economic inequality – genuinely resonate with many Americans.

And although the American mass media have long presumed Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, Sanders’ criticisms of her – that she’s too establishment, too indebted to Wall Street lobbying,** militarily hawkish, and inauthentic – resonate through America’s mainstream media, and have for a long time.

** Much like Barack Obama’s most important Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who was an apprentice to the top Wall Street investment firms and hedge fund entrepreneurs, and who designed the financial bailouts of Obama’s first term to protect large banks and bankers, leaving millions of ordinary homeowners underwater.

Sanders’ populism is why soft Donald Trump supporters lean more toward Sanders than Clinton among current swing voters. He, like Trump, is seen as a voice for ordinary people. Sanders has the advantage over Trump of policy proposals that are based in real economic and political solutions, and not scapegoating and racism.

I don’t consider “not being electable” to be a real criticism of a politician’s policies or ideas. It’s a way to dismiss them without engaging the ideas themselves, presuming that they’re too different from the country’s mainstream to attract any support at all.

There is no voice more perfectly suited for channelling
the frustrations of the American people than that of a
cranky, elderly Jewish man.

It presumes that a population is never open to supporting anything but slightly different takes on the status quo. It presumes that genuine political change isn’t possible. If you build a mass political movement first, a movement that reaches beyond its in-group, then the election will follow.

Aiming for electability alone is what doomed Canada’s New Democrats. Messaging that appealed to conservatives only attracted a small number of new supporters while turning away much of the base support to Justin Trudeau, who depicted himself as the candidate of genuine radical change.

But is Sanders a new McGovern? I don’t think so. For one thing, Nixon was no Trump. Nixon may have begun the GOP’s Southern Strategy of implicit race-baiting, but he never descended into demagoguery. Cruz has made a major plank of his platform attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, a creation of Richard Nixon.

Trump, Cruz, and the Republican Establishment has thrown the racism, elitism, and violence of American conservatism into the light by demurring about nothing. What Nixon hid in euphemism, Trump and and the other Republican candidates now, and Mitt Romney in 2012, all say openly. 

The leaders of the conservative movement really do tell it like it is. And they do so in the context of a financial crisis that has massively hurt nearly everyone in the country.

In 1972, George McGovern was the spokesperson for
America's progressive social movements in the country's
party politics. But the public support of mass police
violence against anti-war protesters at that year's
Democratic National Convention showed that
Americans weren't ready to embrace such a movement.
At least, they weren't back then.

In the early 1970s, there were plenty of Americans distrustful of the period’s rebellious youth culture and in favour of the Vietnam War. And today, there are plenty of Americans who distrust modern youth culture, and who favour massive military intervention throughout the Middle East. 

But damn near every American knows somebody who went underwater on their mortgage a few years ago. Or they did themselves. That’s the message of Bernie Sanders: We can’t trust the people whose economic policies made that disaster happen and then paid off the criminal class of stockbrokers and hedge funds.

That’s also the difference between what made McGovern a failure in 1972 and will make Sanders a success in 2016. The American economy never collapsed in the mid-1960s, but it did in 2008.

All the Republicans think the policies that led to that collapse – low taxes for the wealthy, wages free to spiral down to the lowest common desperation, no real regulations on the banking sector – are actually how you build a successful economy. 

Hillary Clinton is deeply associated with Wall Street as a lobbying group, and is well-known as a politician who repays favours. Barack Obama’s first Treasury Secretary bailed out the economic fraudsters and criminals in the first place.

Bernie Sanders is the only one running for US President with sensible social democratic policies and a simple message to the plunder of the American people by an oligarch class: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!!!!

So many people agree with him about this already, across generations, social classes, religions, and cultures that they constitute a true mass movement. Once that’s your voter coalition, the election takes care of itself.

Success in Growth, or The Ones Who Call Him Zoolander Will Never Listen Anyway, Jamming, 13/12/2015

I'm a member of the New Democratic Party. My campaigning in southern Etobicoke this summer and fall was all over Twitter. Sometimes, older members of my family will tell me I shouldn't mention this on the internet, because employers would discriminate against me for my political beliefs.

But seriously, as much as the 100-year-old people who joined up back when it was the CCF rant about socialism, the NDP isn’t a hard left-wing party anymore. At least not in the old communist sense. 

Justin Trudeau having a great time at Pride Vancouver.
He is epochal now. Deal with it.

I was damn disappointed in this election, though. I genuinely think the NDP would have made the best government for Canada, or at least, we should have held the balance of power in a Liberal minority to make sure their policies remained in line with what was best for the people.

Instead, I found myself in conversations – in real life and online – with people who had been lifelong supporters of the NDP. These people accused Tom Mulcair of being a hardcore, right-wing, pro-austerity conservative. They thought the NDP had betrayed all its basic values, and were voting Liberal.

I've written about the party’s failures to communicate before, both here and at Rabble. That’s not what I'm talking about today.

Instead, I want to talk about successful communication. That's why I want to talk about Justin Trudeau.

We all know the narrative now. Trudeau thrived on being underestimated. While everyone thought of him as an empty-headed pretty-boy who was coasting into parliament on his father’s name and legacy, he was networking with leadership circles all over Canada to build an enormously diverse team of politicians.

People who may never necessarily have thought about running for parliament, especially for a decimated Liberal Party that looked to be dying off, were inspired to join the Trudeau banner. They worked their communities, their neighbourhoods, and peddled the message of hope that was at the centre of Trudeau’s campaign.

Justin Trudeau combines his father's intelligence and
Machiavellian deviousness with a genuine love of
interacting with everyday people.

And they won. It was the same with everyone who voted for them.

A few years ago, I read a book by John Ibbitson called The Big Shift. It was about Harper’s plan to remake the Canadian state so that its services would no longer supply the progressive social programs that a century of Liberal dominance built. And the people would love their new, more cruel, more harsh country.

But they didn’t, even as Harper kept winning larger parliamentary shares until his majority in 2011. Once Harper had a majority government and no longer had to wheedle and downplay how radical his changes to the Canadian state institution were, Canadian people came to hate it. 

Harper’s strategy to stay in point in the 2015 election smacked of obvious desperation. Double down on demonization of everyone opposed to you, or even a little critical of you. The opposition parties, the media, social movements. They were all mocked and insulted in Conservative party communications. 

Hate and resentment are the last acts of desperate people. It stirs up a paranoid, spiteful base, but it doesn't appeal to anyone who isn’t already filled with the hatred you’re encouraging.

I probably won't make it to the NDP leadership
convention in Edmonton due to work commitments, but
I will support Tom Mulcair stepping down. I think he's
a good leader, but his public image has been completely
ruined by the conservative messaging of the 2015
campaign. He has no more credibility to lead the NDP
against a Liberal government that's already positioned
itself in the public eye as more progressive than he is.
Mulcair may talk about being "the progressive
opposition," but Canadians don't believe him anymore.

The NDP were softer in tone, but ultimately no better. Worse, since our campaign made two mistakes instead of Harper's one. NDP campaign communication staff tried to rile up our base with messages about the evil and destructiveness of Harper and his cronies. And at least they targeted those properly.

Yet the mass media messages turned the NDP base away at the same time. We were trying to appeal to conservative-leaning people, especially with balanced budget messaging. 

But conservative people will never support the NDP, even the modern social democratic version. Many of them still believe all the hype about New Democrats being communists. 

So the NDP played it super-safe, aiming to sound like reassuring, conservative voices when the people were desperate for genuine radical breaks from the Harper years. 

The NDP communications and campaign leadership painted us as compassionate conservatives because they thought the key to victory was winning over people who were already regular voters, but simply voted Conservative last time. 

The result? Our vote collapsed in absolute quantity and in share of the total. Frankly, I’m amazed we pulled through to the degree we did.

Trudeau is the victor. Hands down. It’s impossible to ignore. And he will dominate Canadian politics for the next 20 years. At least. I hope the Liberal Party is able to control the corruption that will reappear once they become Canada’s “natural governing party" again.

To all the conservative supporters who hate his smooth media image, or who think they can rile up hatred for him because his childcare workers are government employees:* you dismiss him at your peril and you do not understand.

* And not the real reason you should be upset, which is because their pay is still shit.

Because Trudeau did more than simply win an election. Voter turnout this October was 68%, the highest turnout percentage since 1993. There were 17-million ballots cast. More ballots than any other election in Canadian history. His victory was built on inspiring people who had never voted before to cast ballots.

My conservative friends would be horrified at the prospect,
but I seriously think that Trudeau's potential impact on
Canadian society can be even greater than his father's.

That means more people were inspired to vote, to take part in choosing the leader of the Canadian state, than ever before. They voted Trudeau and Liberal. Many of those were young people, who will carry their party preferences forward for most of their lives. 

The campaign galvanized them. All those media appearances that conservatives think are a sign of Trudeau’s empty-headed vapidity? These mass media images lock down the loyalty of an entire generation of politically engaged Canadians.

Until we realize the magnitude of all this, the opposition to Trudeau and the Liberals, whether from social democrats or conservatives, will fail.

Justin Trudeau set entirely new terms of politics in Canada. He made a whole new epoch. We now have to learn it and get used to it.

Always Coming So Never Shows Up, Research Time, 21/10/2015

These disconnected posts about Canada's federal election on Monday ended up having a pretty clear common theme. Catch up on what I hate essentially about Harper, and my biggest disappointment in #elxn42.
• • •
Coming out of the Canadian election that saw Stephen Harper kicked out of the Prime Minister’s Office* is an appropriate time to write a book about the utopian in politics. The way I saw people celebrating the end of Harper – if only through online communities – it was as though we emerged from a long, national nightmare.

* I only hope that all the juiciest evidence of misconduct avoided the shredder on the way out. M. Trudeau II, I expect a full inventory of Harper regime archaeology of how our now-ex-PM ran his government. 

This man is now Canada's Prime Minister.

In a way, we did. In a way, that nightmare is inescapable. Even though the biggest and most obvious symbol of the world’s iniquities in my country is gone, it’s not like everything is roses and daisies. We all have a lot more work to do.

The global economy is still frighteningly fragile, wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the super-elite, we still face serious climate changes and ecological destruction, and Syria has undeniably grown into the Third World War.

I don’t think this statement is all that radical. I’m not saying anything that Bernie Sanders isn’t. Then again, some even suggest that Bernie Sanders is no radical. That he uses inspiring words to round people up so they’ll vote for the same old corrupt leaders.

We all want someone who can save us. We love heroes. My favourite show is Doctor Who. I love stories about an awesome hero who inspires people to transform their world for the better. So many of us are waiting for that hero to lead us to a world that, compared to what we have now, is utopia.

But I know it’s a story. Stories aren’t about telling us explicitly what the world is really like. The value of Doctor Who is as a model for each of us to be ourselves. Each of us – privately and publicly – we work and figure out individually and together how to live better lives.

Don’t wait for someone to lead you to utopia. Figure out how to make one yourself. All of us. 

That’s how I think when I look at TrudeauMania 2015, unfolding in all those shirtless pics of Canada’s new PM. Yes, Harper is gone and Justin Trudeau has a level of sexiness that has approached the apex of Ghost-Swayze.

One election doesn’t make a perfectly just world. Let’s not kid ourselves. 

Other sexiness vectors include Vampire-
Pitt, Jurassic-Pratt, Hamm-hock, and 
Channing-Your-Tatum.

That’s the problem with real politics. You can set concrete goals – enact this policy, redistribute this oligarchical wealth, pass this law, elect this leader – but there’s always more to do after each act. There remains injustice that we have to work against. No matter how much we succeed, the world isn’t quite perfect.

We want the struggle to end, but in the end, there’s always the next struggle. Our visions of a utopia inspire us to act, but even success leaves the need for more action.

This is the messianic experience of time. It’s an idea that I’d never really understood until I read it in a bus stop. I know his books from the 1970s are absolutely ape-shit, but by 1992, Jacques Derrida wrote pretty clearly. Even if he still had sentences that were half a page long. They actually had rhythm.

The messianic is when we experience our lives as though we were marching toward some radical transformation. Some of us think we’ll be led there no matter what we do individually. Some thing we’ll only achieve it if we actively work together. That’s the difference between a follower and a social movement.

Earlier this week, I said that politics at its purest is people organizing themselves to change their world. Even in the everyday moments of kindness we show to each other. These small acts still have some small role in making humanity better. We all contribute to each other’s lives every moment of every day.

If these times are teaching me – and all of us – anything about the perfect worlds we dream of, it’s that they won’t be achieved with a big event that everyone sees. It’s achieved in the small moments of life, one act of kindness at a time. So it can eventually scale up to the level of nations.

Why I Can’t Trust Canada’s Federal Liberals and Neither Should You, Advocate, 14/02/2015

Since the news broke early last week, I’ve had my eye on Eve Adams’ switch to the Liberal party and Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s announcement that she’ll run in Conservative Finance Minister Joe Oliver’s district in north Toronto, the Eglinton-Lawrence riding.* This is a post of purely political analysis and speculation, one relatively intelligent Canadian thinking out loud on the internet about the parties jockeying for control of the country in this Fall’s federal election.

* Just to warn you all, this post is heavy on Canadian politics. It’s also heavy on anger. After it goes live, I’m meeting my girlfriend for a whimsical day of shopping and watching Star Trek on Netflix. Happy Valentine’s Day.

Eve Adams, Canada's latest example of barely
competent political corruption.

Now, if I was in Trudeau’s position, I’d be an entirely different human being. But speaking from my observer’s position, Adams doesn’t appear to be a trustworthy person in any significant way. She and her partner Dimitri Soudas have been Conservative party members and activists all their lives. Now they've had their club membership torn up. For someone who has devoted literally her entire lifetime to a political party, to have left it for their historic, moral political enemy, the Liberal party, must have meant something very serious had happened.

Or maybe not. The press conference where Adams and Trudeau announced her party switch was filled with so many hollow platitudes, it practically echoed. Adams had lately been trying to parachute herself into a different riding association for this year’s election, because her current riding, Mississauga-Brampton South, was going to shrink in a redistricting to deal with population changes. 

Since she lives in Oakville, she tried to get the Conservative riding association for the Oakville-North Burlington district to make her its candidate instead of running in the shrunken riding. She made a fool of herself by barging into its nominating meeting and attempting to railroad herself in as a candidate. She repeatedly interrupted other speakers during the meeting and essentially tried to filibuster it. I don’t really need to say that it wasn’t very effective. 

Perhaps more critically, Adams has faced substantiated accusations that her campaign for the nomination paid people to join the Conservative party in exchange for their support. 

It also seems that Soudas abused his position as executive director of the federal Conservative party to smooth Adams’ way to the 2015 nomination. The exact details of what he did never came fully to light, but this is what got him fired from one of the top staff positions in Canada’s ruling political party. He even said in a CBC interview during the thick of her nomination fight, “I’ll breach any contract that says I can’t help my family.”

No one believes a word you say when everyone who
cares believes that you're a liar.

It sounds like an admirable position of loyalty to the people closest to you, but in this case, it amounted to abandoning basic moral norms about conflict of interest when it comes to the procedures to ensure transparency and fairness in the collective decision process of who gets to become part of the national legislature. He was effectively justifying political corruption as an expression of familial love and loyalty. 

After a year of ridiculous and corrupt dealings of Adams and Soudas to secure her nomination, Stephen Harper eventually put his foot down. Adams was becoming a laughing stock and a humiliation, Soudas could no longer be trusted; they were liabilities. Harper made a decree: Adams would never be a Conservative party candidate at the federal level again.

So she became a Liberal one, running against the popular Joe Oliver in northern Toronto. 

With all these allegations of corrupt behaviour, it makes little sense as to why Justin Trudeau, or anyone in the Liberal party, would trust Adams to join them in an election year. Mind you, she certainly found it easy to secure a candidacy, Trudeau parachuting her into the Eglinton-Lawrence Liberal riding association by a decree of his own.

While Trudeau himself will likely never talk to Soudas, Liberal party organizers will, picking his brain for everything he ever experienced working in the upper echelons of the Conservative party, and Stephen Harper’s inner circle. He’s an intelligence gold mine. It makes perfect sense to do so.

But Eve Adams and Dimitri Soudas are only Liberals by name. The fact that Trudeau, despite his stances on abortion, marijuana legalization, and a host of other social issues, can so easily accept a lifelong right-winger like Adams into his party is a sign that the Liberal party has not changed after its humiliating four years as the third-place party in Canada’s parliament for the first time in its history.

The Liberal party, since the days of its first real super-operative, C. D. Howe, has prioritized power over ideology. Avoiding ideological thinking is fine, but you’re supposed to prioritize value, social and personal ethics. Pursuing power for power’s sake is inherently authoritarian, and doing so in a democratic electoral framework doesn’t block that. 

And yet so many still believe that he has virtue.

Eve Adams wanted to run in a safe Conservative seat so she could stay in power in Canada’s parliament. She pursued such corrupt means to do so that even Stephen Harper thought her too much of a liability, so cut her off. Now she gets to run in one of the safest Conservative seats in the country. As a Liberal.

Trudeau accepted Adams into the party and gave her a seat that she’ll likely lose because he wanted the intelligence of she and Soudas to build their strategy against Harper and the Conservatives. And he’ll probably get enough actionable intelligence to beat them. I almost want to see Soudas’ conversations with the 2010s’ Howes, just because I love that kind of intensity.

But Adams will always be small fry in politics. Everyone who looks into her background over the last four years will see how corrupt she is. She can’t wash the stink of blind, selfish ambition off herself anymore. It’s the same with her fiancé Soudas. The best political snakes are so utterly ambitious and power hungry, they’ll abandon any political ideals for power and the information that will let them win it, while still appearing as a true statesman.

Justin Trudeau, ladies and gentlemen.