Category: Reputation

A Pathetic Throne Speech is Not a Dangerous One

Maclean’s columnist, David Moscrop, wrote today (June 23, 2017) about BC Premier Christy Clark’s shallow grasp at retaining power. Below, in reverse order, are my response and Moscrop’s opinion piece that prompted me.

A Pathetic Throne Speech is Not a Dangerous One

“Insidious and dangerous” is a bit much. I do agree on some basis with the article – my own first thought after hearing Clark’s platform announcement was “OK, why even have parties”?

But, obviously, among that 40% of voters are some very upset conservatives. They’ll see that Clark gets turfed as leader, and that will be a measure of accountability for her pathetic desperation-move. She can’t change horses mid-stream without upsetting plenty of Liberals so, no, nothing insidious or dangerous in her move. Moscrop puts it best, himself, near his closing: “…she imagines a world…”

Exactly. In Clark’s imagination, this shameless attempt actually had a chance, which is the only explanation for her attempting it – all the more reason to pity her, cast her aside, and move on. Politics and cynicism are sure to find new heroes anyway. Meanwhile, sixteen years of Clark has been far more than plenty. This move underscores her character, and the one thing long-serving professional politicians need is a dose of humility.

If any government move is insidious (although not necessarily dangerous, as compared to the potential for impasse after impasse), it’s Trudeau’s non-partisan Senate. Plenty has been written about that, even this week. Or how about the ‘Access To Information’ revisions revealed this week that actually expand exemptions and make access to information more difficult?

Incidentally, there’s nothing, repeat, nothing Machiavellian going on with Clark, for a couple reasons: (i) Machiavelli was advising Medici, who wasn’t known for his embrace of representative democracy, and (ii) when implemented shrewdly under the right circumstances, Machiavelli’s advice works. Please don’t insult Machiavelli’s intelligence and insight by lifting Clark to any such achievement. Machiavelli would be pitying her bald-faced panic and laughing – not rolling – in his grave. As for Sophocles, he at least had Antigone kill herself. Then again, Antigone had integrity.

I also agree that Clark’s move reflects the broader political extremism that Moscrop mentions. Seems a bit of poetic justice, then, given how much Clark referred to the US President and his looming presence during her campaign, that she’s fallen victim to similarly extreme behaviour and its consequences. She can’t be impeached, but she can be discarded.

One final point: the NDP-Greens are absolutely not “in the rather awkward position of having to vote against their own ideas” – not at all. What they’re voting against is Clark’s trustworthiness and credibility. Thanks to Clark, they’re able to vote “no confidence” with not only honesty but accuracy. It can only be described as one of the utterly truthful moments politics has ever known.

From Maclean’s

The foul cynicism of Christy Clark’s speech from the throne

Why the doomed B.C. Liberals’ Throne Speech—gruesomely stitched together from the platforms of the party’s rivals—was insidious and dangerous

David Moscrop

June 23, 2017

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark, left, and NDP leader John Horgan, right, look on as B.C. Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon gives the Speech from the Throne in Victoria, Thursday, June 22, 2017. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

There’s an old joke, often attributed to Groucho Marx, that I spent the better part of Thursday thinking about after British Columbia’s premier, Christy Clark, presented her doomed government’s speech from the throne. The comedian is said to have quipped: “These are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I have others.” To be honest, I’d be laughing more right now if the line wasn’t so prescient and insightful as an explanatory tool for understanding politics in the province right now.

In Clark’s speech, read by B.C.’s Lieutenant Governor Judith Guichon, the premier made 30 pledges that were absent from her Liberal Party’s platform of just weeks ago, including more than a dozen lifted from the platforms of the likely-to-govern-soon New Democrats and their Green Party backers. After opposing proposals (presumably as recently as a week ago) such as a referendum on electoral reform, a ban on corporate and union donations to political parties, increases in funding for daycare, social assistance, and disability, scrapping the requirement for a referendum on new transit funding sources, and getting rid of tolls on the Port Mann Bridge, Clark and her Liberals hastily came to embrace them—and others, too.

Friends, I think I’m starting to become rather cynical towards politics.

The Liberals have spun their remarkable about-face as “listening to the voters.” I call shenanigans. The party received about 40 per cent of the popular vote in the 2017 election—down about 4 per cent from their 2013 result—and dropped from 49 seats to 43. These numbers raise the question: just who is the party listening to? Were they not listening to them in 2013? Or is it different voters they’re listening to now? Which ones? Perhaps voters in swing ridings? Or in presumably safe ridings where they lost by a slim margin? I suppose what the premier means is that she’s listening to some new voters, if those folks happen to live where it counts.

Clark’s dramatic conversion to an NDP/Green-light version of her party seems rather like an overcorrection given the modest shift in support between 2013 and 2017. Indeed, if I can be ever-so-cynical for another moment, it seems like the premier is desperately trying to cling to power by selling out her party and its supporters by offering a de facto “renewed” policy platform that stands in stark contrast to the last several years of the B.C. Liberal government and the still-warm corpse of the party’s election platform. No, I think Clark’s volte-face has nothing to do with “listening”—instead, it looks to be the most cynical ploy to maintain (or soon regain) power that I’ve seen in politics in Canada. I mean, who knew that when you mix orange and green you’d get B.C. Liberal blue?

I seem naive, don’t I? How is this any more cynical than politics-as-usual in late-modern liberal democracies? Perhaps Clark’s speech is no different in type when compared to other political ploys, but it’s certainly more extreme in degree. Honestly: The premier lost an election just weeks ago. Her party has been in power for 16 years. She has been premier for six years. And staring down defeat, what does she do? She “borrows” policies from the parties poised to defeat her days from now, abandons years of party commitments, and spins her reversal as “listening to voters,” as if she’d just now discovered the practice of consulting the electorate whom she is meant to serve. And all this after declaring that NDP leader John Horgan is a flip-flopper who isn’t to be trusted and labeling him “Say Anything John.”

Cynicism aside: will the gambit work for Clark? I don’t think so. It’s unlikely that any New Democrat or Green member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) will break ranks and support the premier. Why would they? Once the Liberal government falls, they’ll get their shot at governing, short-lived as it may be; even if an NDP MLA were tempted to trade their shot at governing for a more stable legislature and some of their policies, their supporters wouldn’t soon forget the betrayal. And for the Greens, they’ve just made a deal to support the NDP, so it would be tricky from them to try to wiggle their way out of it so soon. On top of it all, of course, who can trust Clark and her Liberals now? No: the NDP and the Greens will, as expected, defeat the Clark government next week on a confidence motion and John Horgan will become premier of British Columbia.

Nonetheless, the Throne Speech does put the two opposition parties in the rather awkward position of having to vote against their own ideas. Yes, NDP leader John Horgan and Green Party leader Andrew Weaver must instruct their caucuses to defeat their own agenda—for the moment—so that it can be reborn and pursued under the aegis of the NDP-Green supply and confidence agreement. It’s a moment worthy of Sophocles. If Sophocles were a total hack.

As shrewd as this move may seem to Clark, who will surely use the “Nay” votes of NDP and Green MLAs as fodder for her election argument—“See, I tried to work with these guys! I even copied their platforms!”—the Premier may end up hoisted with her own petard. What happens when the NDP and Greens re-introduce these policies in the months to come (after all, the policies are their ideas) and Clark as Leader of the Opposition is faced with either supporting the government or voting against pledges she’s just recently made in her own Throne Speech? Perhaps she’ll be able to find some minor concerns to use as a pretext to oppose the NDP-Green iteration of the policy, but by then we’ll be way, way down the rabbit hole.

Whatever happens in the days, weeks, and months to come, though, one of the most insidious threats embedded in Clark’s cynical Throne Speech is a deeply disturbing conception of politics. Premier Clark has, in effect, tried to reduce politics to mere management and power; by raiding the NDP and Green platforms with abandon, by taking policy ideas that happen to be popular now, and by arguing that she is just borrowing the best bits from each party, she has indicated that deep and persistent ideological differences, which are reflective of real differences that one should expect and even celebrate in a pluralist democracy, are trivial concerns when power is at stake. Clark has stitched together a Frankenstein’s monster that she claims she’s best suited to command. What could go wrong? After all, everything turns out okay in Frankenstein, right?

The Premier’s vision of politics presented in the Throne Speech is post-political; she’s imagining a world where parties are mere brokers of the public will of the moment, interchangeable except for their respective management expertise, and the only questions relevant to politics is how to gain and keep power, alongside some technical questions about how to implement whichever policies happen to be fashionable at the time. Clark’s approach to politics is dangerous, not only because it’s hopelessly and shamelessly cynical, but also because it’s disrespectful and unhelpful to voters who rely on parties as aggregators of ideas that lead to policies they like. Reducing politics to mere whims of the moment, technocratic management concerns, and Machiavellian power struggles undermines parties and productive partisanship as helpful touchstones for voters while also pretending that there aren’t very real and very persistent disagreements in our society that cannot be reduced to technical questions of “how” and “by whom,” rather than “what” or “why.”

British Columbians will survive this frustrating and embarrassing chapter in the history of our politics. Citizens are not fools, and our system of government remains, as ever, plenty sound—if not quite as inclusive and participatory as it might be. Indeed, I believe Clark’s cynical gambit will fail, and we’ll all move on.

And yet, we shouldn’t forget what happened with this speech from the throne. That speech represents the worst of a short-sighted, desperate, and cynical kind of politics. In the future, leaders ought to hold it up as an example of what we should all strive to avoid in civic life. If we can do that, perhaps some good will come from this sad mess.

http://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-foul-cynicism-of-christy-clarks-speech-from-the-throne/

On “The Nobility of the Political Enterprise”

Well-respected journalist, Dan Rather, posted on Facebook today (June 20, 2017). Below, in reverse order, are my response, then Rather’s post, and finally the editorial that prompted him, a column by Michael Gerson of The Washington Post.

**********

On “The Nobility of the Political Enterprise”

On nearly every point (from Gerson, cited by Rather) I agree, as each pertains to this president. But this final one… “the nobility of the political enterprise, viewing politics as conquest rather than as service” is all too easily suggested, in light of all this president’s incompetence. Surely the nobility of the political enterprise is under continual threat, just for starters: extremely bi-partisan Washington, talk radio echo chambers, silos of identity-politics, the debt-ceiling game of chicken, professional lobbying, gerrymandering, the list goes on, and these merely recent examples.

Remember the movie, Dave, when Charles Grodin says his business would fail if he ran it like government? We all got the joke, and that was nearly thirty years ago, so the threat to nobility was just as real then, and before then. Ironically, today, this president is proving the opposite, that government can’t be run like business because – indeed – it is a noble enterprise, not a profit-making endeavour, and it requires careful stewardship on behalf of everyone.

Where in the world does any systemic “political nobility” exist in the first place, aside from the abstract, like the Constitution on paper? I don’t ask about one-off examples but, rather, for some historical examples of noble political longevity. My guess is that any example comes down to the inter-relationship of many many people, altogether, which dovetails nicely with all the criticism aimed here at this president and his childish lies and bullying. Yes, this president’s incompetence amplifies and reinvigorates itself in noteworthy, significant ways, and he is a fool and an ignoramus, and he is pathetic. But he is far from the lone guilty party when it comes to the nobility of the political enterprise. If anything, the current political enterprise is guilty of permitting him any kind of access, much less success, in the first place.

With respect to service over conquest, or any sought-after political outcomes in a system that’s up-and-running, don’t we simply get what we deserve? If we don’t like the outcomes, then change the inner works and the loopholes and various machinations. This president is undeniably hapless and utterly out of his depth, dead to any nobility. Yet he’s also an American citizen whose ultimate path to government was inherently made possible and available because there he now sits as living proof.

From Facebook…

Dan Rather

This is quite a quote:

“Trump has been ruled by compulsions, obsessions and vindictiveness, expressed nearly daily on Twitter. He has demonstrated an egotism that borders on solipsism. His political skills as president have been close to nonexistent. His White House is divided, incompetent and chaotic, and key administration jobs remain unfilled. His legislative agenda has gone nowhere. He has told constant, childish, refuted, uncorrected lies, and demanded and habituated deception among his underlings. He has humiliated and undercut his staff while requiring and rewarding flattery. He has promoted self-serving conspiracy theories. He has displayed pathetic, even frightening, ignorance on policy matters foreign and domestic. He has inflicted his ethically challenged associates on the nation. He is dead to the poetry of language and to the nobility of the political enterprise, viewing politics as conquest rather than as service.”

Such is the verdict of Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post. He is not some liberal critic but a proud Republican who was a top aide to President George W. Bush. Needless to say he is not a fan of Donald Trump, but neither does he support Democratic policies. His point is that no good will come to the GOP from its complicity with Donald Trump, because we are on a dangerous path with no clear end game.

His column is worth reading in full.

From The Washington Post

The GOP’s hard, messy options for destroying Trumpism

by Michael Gerson

Opinion writer

June 19 at 8:07 PM

Nearly 150 days into the Trump era, no non-delusional conservative can be happy with the direction of events or pleased with the options going forward.

President Trump is remarkably unpopular, particularly with the young (among whom his approval is underwater by a remarkable 48 percentage points in one poll). And the reasons have little to do with elitism or media bias.

Trump has been ruled by compulsions, obsessions and vindictiveness, expressed nearly daily on Twitter. He has demonstrated an egotism that borders on solipsism. His political skills as president have been close to nonexistent. His White House is divided, incompetent and chaotic, and key administration jobs remain unfilled. His legislative agenda has gone nowhere. He has told constant, childish, refuted, uncorrected lies, and demanded and habituated deception among his underlings. He has humiliated and undercut his staff while requiring and rewarding flattery. He has promoted self-serving conspiracy theories. He has displayed pathetic, even frightening, ignorance on policy matters foreign and domestic. He has inflicted his ethically challenged associates on the nation. He is dead to the poetry of language and to the nobility of the political enterprise, viewing politics as conquest rather than as service.

Trump has made consistent appeals to prejudice based on religion and ethnicity, and associated the Republican Party with bias. He has stoked tribal hostilities. He has carelessly fractured our national unity. He has attempted to undermine respect for any institution that opposes or limits him — be it the responsible press, the courts or the intelligence community. He has invited criminal investigation through his secrecy and carelessness. He has publicly attempted to intimidate law enforcement. He has systematically alarmed our allies and given comfort to authoritarians. He promised to emancipate the world from American moral leadership — and has kept that pledge.

For many Republicans and conservatives, there is apparently no last straw, with offenses mounting bale by bale. The argument goes: Trump is still superior to Democratic rule — which would deliver apocalyptic harm — and thus anything that hurts Trump is bad for the republic. He is the general, so shut up and salute. What, after all, is the conservative endgame other than Trump’s success?

This is the recommendation of sycophancy based on hysteria. At some point, hope for a new and improved Trump deteriorates into unreason. The idea that an alliance with Trump will end anywhere but disaster is a delusion. Both individuals and parties have long-term interests that are served by integrity, honor and sanity. Both individuals and the Republican Party are being corrupted and stained by their embrace of Trump. The endgame of accommodation is to be morally and politically discredited. Those committed to this approach warn of national decline — and are practically assisting it. They warn of decadence — and provide refreshments at the orgy.

So what is the proper objective for Republicans and conservatives? It is the defeat of Trumpism, preferably without the destruction of the GOP itself. And how does that happen?

Creating a conservative third party — as some have proposed — would have the effect of delivering national victories to a uniformly liberal and unreformed Democratic Party. A bad idea.

A primary challenge to Trump in the 2020 presidential election is more attractive, but very much an outside shot. An unlikely idea.

It is possible — if Democrats take the House in 2018 — that impeachment will ripen into a serious movement, which thoughtful Republicans might join (as they eventually did against Richard Nixon). But this depends on matters of fact and law that are currently hidden from view. A theoretical idea.

A Democratic victory in the 2020 election would represent the defeat of Trumpism and might be a prelude to Republican reform. But Democrats seem to be viewing Trump’s troubles as an opportunity to plunge leftward with a more frankly socialistic and culturally liberal message. That is hardly attractive to Republican reformers. A heretical idea.

Or Republicans and conservatives could just try to outlast Trump — closing the shutters and waiting for the hurricane to pass — while rooting for the success of a strong bench of rising 40-something leaders (Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse). This may be the most practical approach but risks eight years of ideological entrenchment by Trumpism, along with massive damage to the Republican brand. A complacent idea.

Whatever option is chosen, it will not be easy or pretty. And any comfort for Republicans will be cold because they brought this fate on themselves and the country.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-gops-hard-messy-options-for-destroying-trumpism/2017/06/19/d6483a56-5517-11e7-a204-ad706461fa4f_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.c05d8b886293

Teaching Open-Mindedly in the Post-Truth Era

[Updated June 09, 2018]

I had brilliant students, can’t say enough about them, won’t stop trying. I happened to be in touch with one alumna – as sharp a thinker as I’ve ever met, and a beautiful writer – in the wake of the U.S. election campaign last winter and wrote the following piece in response to a question she posed:

How do you teach open-mindedly in the post-truth era?

I was pleased that she asked, doubly so at having a challenging question to consider! And I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to compose a thoughtful reply. Not my own best writing, perhaps, but containing some insight, anyway.

I’ve revised things here a little, for a broader audience, but nothing of substance has changed.

How do you teach open-mindedly in the post-truth era?

Good heavens. Hmm… with respect for peoples’ dignity, is my most immediate response. But such a question.

Ultimately, it takes two because any kind of teaching is a relationship – better still, a rapport, listening and speaking in turn, and willingly. Listening, not just hearing. But if listening (and speaking) is interpreting, then bias is inescapable, and there needs to be continual back-and-forth efforts to clarify, motivated by incentives to want to understand: that means mutual trust and respect, and both sides openly committed. So one question I’d pose back to this question pertains to the motives and incentives for teaching (or learning) ‘X’ in the first place. Maybe this question needs a scenario, to really illustrate details, but trust and respect seem generally clear enough.

Without trust and respect, Side ‘A’ is left to say, “Well, maybe some day they’ll come around to our way of thinking” (that being a kind portrayal) and simply walks away. This, I think, is closed-minded to the degree that ‘A’ hasn’t sought to reach a thorough understanding (although maybe ‘A’ has). Anyway, it’s not necessarily mean-spirited were someone to say this. With the best intentions, ‘A’ might conclude that ‘B’ is just not ready for the “truth.” But broadly, I’d say this is more like quitting than teaching, which is to say a total failure to teach, at least as I take “teaching” from your question. It would differ somewhat if said by the learner vs the teacher. Then we might conclude that the learner lacked motivation or confidence, for some reason, or perhaps felt alone or unsupported, but again… scenarios.

Another thing to say is, “Well, you just can’t argue with stupid,” as in we can’t even agree on facts, but saying this would be passing judgment on ol’ stupid over there, and likewise hardly open-minded. Personally, I’d never say bias precludes truth, only that we’ll never escape our biases. The real trouble is having bias at all, which I think is what necessitates trust and respect because the less of these is all the more turmoil. I figure any person’s incentive to listen arises from whatever they think will be to their own benefit for having listened. But “benefit” you could define to infinity, and that’s where the post-truth bit is really the troublesome bit because all you have is to trust that other person’s interpretation, and they yours, or else not.

Yeah, I see “post-truth” as “anti-trust,” and for me, that’s a powderkeg, the most ominous outcome arisen of late. People need incentives to listen, but if treating them with dignity and respect isn’t reaching them, then whatever they wanted to begin with wasn’t likely a positive relationship with me. That’s telling of the one side, if not both sides. At the same time, it’s harder to say of students that they have no incentives to listen or that they don’t trust teachers on account of some broader post-truth culture – that might be changing, who knows, but I hope not.

But I’m leaving some of your question behind, and I don’t want to lose sight of where it’s directed more towards the person doing the teaching (how do you teach open-mindedly…).

That part of the question was also in my immediate reaction: respect peoples’ dignity. If it’s me teaching, say, then to have any hope of being open-minded, I intentionally need to respect that other person’s dignity. I need to be more self-aware, on a sliding scale, as to how open- or closed-minded I’m being just now, on this-or-that issue. So that’s empathy, but it’s self aware, and it’s intentional.

Me being me, I’d still be the realist and say you just can never really know what the other person’s motive truly is – pre-truth or post-truth world, doesn’t matter. But whether or not you trust the other, or they you, the real valuable skill is being able to discern flaws of reason, which is what I always said about you – you’ve always been one to see through the bull shit and get to the core of something. I’m no guru or icon, I’m just me, but as I see it just now, the zeitgeist is an emotional one more than a rational one, and there’s plenty to understand why that might be the case. Given that emotional dominance, I do think post-truth makes the world potentially far more dangerous, as a result.

Whatever incentives people are identifying for themselves, these days, are pretty distinct, and that’s a hard one for unity. That saying about partisan politics – “We want the same things; we just differ how to get there” – that doesn’t apply as widely right now so, by virtue of the other side being “the other” side, neither side’s even able to be open-minded beyond themselves because trust and respect are encased in the echo chambers. Things have become distinctly divisive – partisan politics, I mean, but I wonder how deeply those divisions can cut.

So, for instance, lately I find with my Dad that I listen and may not always agree, but where I don’t always agree, he’s still my Dad, and I find myself considering what he says based on his longevity – he’s seen the historic cycle, lived through history repeating itself. And I obviously trust and respect my Dad, figuring, on certain issues, that he must know more than me. On other issues, he claims to know more. On others still, I presume he does. Based on trust and respect, I give him the benefit of the doubt through and through. One of us has to give, when we disagree, or else we’d just continually argue over every disagreement. Someone has to make “benefit” finite by acquiescing, by compromising themselves right out of the debate. If you want peace, someone has to give, right? So should I trust my Dad? I respect him because he’s given me plenty good reason after such a long time. Certainly I’m familiar with his bias, grown accustomed to it – how many times over my life have I simply taken his bias for granted?

I see it even more clearly with my daughter, now, who trusts me on account of (i) her vulnerability yet (ii) my love. The more she lives and learns alongside me, as time passes by, the more cyclically that outlook is reiterated, like how self-fulfilling prophecy works. Other parents keep warning me that the day’s coming when she’ll become the cynical teenager, and I’m sure it will – I remember going through it, myself. But I’m older, now, and back to respecting my Dad, so at least for some relationships, the benefit of the doubt returns. My Dad preceded me, kept different circles than me, and has lived through two or three very different generations than I have. Even as we see the same world, we kind of don’t. So this is what I wonder about that deep cut of division, reaching the level of family – not just one given family but right across the entire population. Do I fact-check my Dad, or myself, or maybe both? Should I? Because neither one of us is infallible.

Anyway, the child of the parent, it’s as good an example as I can think of for questioning what it means to learn with an open mind because there’s no such thing as “unbiased,” yet love, trust, and respect are hardly what we’d call “closed-minded,” except that they are, just in a positive way. They leave no room for scepticism or wariness, the kinds of traits we consider acceptable in healthy proportions. But “teaching” with an open-mind takes on so much more baggage, I think, because the teacher occupies the de facto and the de jure seat-of-power, at least early on – school is not a democracy (although that seems, now, to be changing, too), yet teachers are no more or less trustworthy on the face of it than any other person. That’s also why I reduce my response to respecting human dignity because, even if it’s positive closed-minded, at least it’s a do-no-harm approach.

That jibes with everything I’ve learned about good teaching, as in good teaching ultimately reduces to strong, healthy relationships. Short-term fear vs long-term respect – it’s obvious which has more lasting positive influence. And since influencing others with our bias is inevitable, we ought to take responsibility for pursuing constructive outcomes, or else it’s all just so much gambling. At the core, something has to matter to everybody, or we’re done.