With the recent elections in Quebec, in which many people were decidedly unimpressed by all of the parties, and with the recent announcement that Justin Trudeau will probably run for (and win) the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party, I've been doing a lot of thinking not only about politics, but also about our politicians. Those thoughts have also been fueled by a personal reflection on the use of police force in the state. More specifically, I was trying to figure out why it is that I feel so strongly that the introduction of Bill 78 was wrong, whereas the declaration of the War Measures Act during the October Crisis seems acceptable. (On that latter issue, I think it's that the FLQ had already resorted to and threatened further violence, whereas the student demonstrations were inherently peaceful, violent actions being condemned widely by the students in whose name some violent acts were ostensibly carried out.)
So what of these politicians, these people (mostly men) who offer to run our country, our provinces, and our cities on our behalf? One startling realisation while I was watching the leaders' debate leading up to the federal election in May of 2011 was that our politicians are doing two things: first, they talk about funds but never values; second, they do an awful lot of smearing of one another. The smear campaigns are old hat these days, as they've been going on for too long already, and we see them so widely adopted. Our democracy can't be very healthy if we're electing our leaders as the best among an overly sleazy and untrustworthy group of people that decided to run, and we can't be surprised to find that the people do not identify with or trust their political representatives when this is the case. Again, many friends of mine in Quebec declared how unhappy they were with Charest and the PLQ, but said that they didn't want any of the other parties running the show either. Surprisingly, in spite of those sentiments, a huge number of Quebecers turned out to vote this past week, which I was very glad to learn.
But my main complaint against the majority of political discourse these days is the near-total absence of the discussion of value. People drone on and on about cutting or raising taxes to the rich, expanding or contracting social programs, etc, but they never address the question head on: what responsibility do we have to our fellow community members? On this hangs answers to questions about what is fair taxation rate for upper income brackets, what is a fair amount of welfare, of tuition payment, etc, but politicians don't seem to ever talk about that. Are values simply off limits for rational discourse in our contemporary society, merely tolerant of multiculturalism but unengaged across cultural boundaries? Is this really the way that we want to run our society, refusing to engage in discourse about values simply because someone whose values differ might be offended? Of course, there is a spirit of respectful discourse that should be maintained, and discourse should be broken off when that respect is lost, but I certainly don't believe that this kind of respect is impossible across cultural lines.
And this kind of respect is exactly what we all too seldom find among our political class. Particularly in the States, we can see a polarization between the Republican and Democrat parties (the former run these days by a very strange and radically conservative group) that results not only in an impossibility of agreement, but furthermore of a hatred for one's opponents. (Bill Clinton's 2012 DNC speech both sums up that situation nicely, and shows us that not all hope for bold, charismatic and understanding leadership is lost.) Why are we lead by people who look so disdainfully on their constituents, who concern themselves so whole-heartedly with being re-elected rather than the successful governance that would earn their re-election? Why is it such a perfect joke when an "Introduction to Congress" class at Harvard is found to be rampant with cheating? Where are all the trustworthy people of our society? Where are the heroic?
Where are the people who make decisions and stand by their convictions not because it is the choice they would like to make, but because it is simply the best choice from a rather unpleasant set of options? Unfortunately, we know where people who make that kind of decision are: at the polling station.
I'm not sure "values" discourse solves the problems here...our politicians in the States do a lot of that, and it hasn't seemed to improve anything.
ReplyDeleteAs for encouraging better people to run for office--I think that's an important and difficult problem, and one that I don't have terribly useful ideas on.
Other than the value of the traditionally defined family, and the aggressive stance against gay marriage that they see following from that, what value discourse is there in the political arena? (I'm not saying there is none, I'm actually just hoping for more examples that we can treat to get to the bottom of this, if indeed a bottom there be.)
DeleteAlso, perhaps what's needed is for me to refine what I'm saying: political discourse these days seems to lack treatment of the responsibilities that our government has to its people, and how those responsibilities also place certain responsibilities on the individual members of society. For instance, whose responsibility is it to see that the poor do not starve, or that they are not left without proper health care, no job prospects, little to no social mobility? If it's the government's responsibility, how does that imply responsibilities for the citizenry (i.e.: what responsibility do we have to support those programs through taxation, and how should that taxation be proportionate to one's financial means, perhaps?) There was a time when people were proud to pay their taxes, because that was a tangible contribution they made to improve society. Are people proud to be the supporters of a flourishing society these days? That seems incommensurate with the rampant problem of tax evasion.
As for encouraging better people to run for office, I think that one way to help that situation is to identify the better people around us, and to encourage them to run for office. Dreadfully unsystematic it may be, but it's a start.
It strikes me that the question of whose responsibility it is to feed the poor is at the heart of the U.S. campaigns. One side says government, the other says the poor themselves. Catholics say "all of us" but that doesn't map very nicely to either party's platform.
DeleteIt seems to me that the government's main responsibility is to create a situation wherein basically everyone has a shot at earning a living that covers (at least) their bare necessities, including food. That situation will almost certainly leave out a few, who just will not have such an opportunity, and it's the society's responsibility, fulfilled in practice through the government, to provide them with those necessities directly.
DeleteUnfortunately, such a situation runs completely against the best interests of big business, at least in the short term. Marxists everywhere are aware of the benefit of a desperate workforce, so far as the employer is concerned, because that allows them to dictate terms to their workers without worrying that they'll reject them and go elsewhere: such a course of action is just not in the cards for someone who's living hand to mouth and without another job on the immediate horizon.
So it is a social responsibility to provide people with a situation wherein their basic needs can be reliably met, such that they are not open to the exploitation of employers preying on their desperation. And where some fall through the cracks, where difference (e.g.: mental or physical disability, health status, age, etc) is not accommodated by the policies meant to facilitate that situation with wide brush strokes, then the responsibility falls to the government to provide those necessities directly.
So does that responsibility fall to the poor themselves, the government, or all of us? All three have some part to play here: all of us, probably through the government, to facilitate that situation; the poor to take up the opportunity when it comes along; and all of us/government again for those whose main problem is not poverty, but for whom poverty is an intermediary causal step between some other inability to take up the opportunity on the one hand, and lack of access to basic requirements on the other.
Secondly, it's not clear to me why you think the War Measures Act was acceptable. Yes, the FLQ had clearly crossed the line, so banning the organization makes sense, but War Measures seems to have precisely meant doing less to discriminate between those who were and weren't ongoing members. And two kidnappings is not a war--it seems like the only distinction between this case and ordinary gang violence is that the government officials themselves felt threatened, rather than poor people in urban neighborhoods.
ReplyDeleteI think that part of my acceptance of the War Measures act has to do with the threshold of evidence required to haul someone in. When the violence is so prolonged, and the threats of violence and blackmail show no sign of abating, perhaps that threshold should be temporarily lowered to deal with a particular issue. You say that the WMA blurred the distinction between those who were and weren't members of the FLQ, but I actually see it as a change of the bar with reference to which charges can be laid, thus making it easier to target the FLQ.
DeleteThere are of course claims of abuse of this power, and some of them are doubtless justified, but remember that that is not the intention of the WMA, but merely its necessary correlate. Remember what I said about making a decision that one does not want to make, but that ultimately is the best among an unpleasant set of options. Furthermore, apparently the arrests under the WMA were noted for being quite humane despite a time of heightened police power when such things as humane treatment all too often go out the window.
Two kidnappings are definitely not a war. But the FLQ's stated goal was to attack the governmental infrastructure that was democratically elected. In that respect, it was not merely the politicians themselves that were threatened, but the democratic populace and process as a whole. Of course, the FLQ denied that the means of governmental election had been democratic, instead suggesting that it had all been rigged and fraudulent. But these are things that people like René Lévesque fought from within the political system rather than through physical violence towards it. Similarly, the students did not adopt violent means to resist the governmental dictates with which they disagreed. They voiced their protest peacefully and the government was defeated in the recent provincial election.
Ordinary gang violence is indeed a problem, but it does not represent an attack on society as a whole. It is certainly an attack on one segment of society, a particularly vulnerable segment that should be protected (through the improvement of social programs and increased social mobility, I might add, not through the treat of bigger, badder prisons), but I think that the issue is different in kind than what the FLQ represented. I know what you mean though: it can easily seem like the rich attacking the poor, or the poor attacking the poor, is something that the government won't do too much about, but they'll spring into action once the poor start attacking the rich. What I'm suggesting is that this is actually not a case of the poor attacking the rich, but instead a case of the FLQ attacking, violently, the democratic underpinnings of society.