Now, we don’t like to judge. We, at barpolitics, like to be even handed in our sobered thinking. We like to give a fair shake when a fair shake is due. For instance, that guy who jostled me in last evenings late night moderate drinking, jostled me in such a way as to cause the spilling of my precious beer, I shook him soundly, I shook him fairly, I shook him and shook him until his friends, and he had many, decided that the shaking was done, and that the time had come for some reciprocal shaking, which, if the truth be known, was unfairly administered, and that is just the point. A fair shake where a fair shake is due.
This is, however, no time for sober thinking. We are, after all, in an electoral political system, and why ruin it with clear thought unobstructed with needlessly sentimental calls to ideas that feel true?
The jaundiced blear eyed squint of the late morning lean to our collective hangover that we like to call political commentary in this well governed land needs to be commented on. It is true, there is something particularly odd about a commentary on the commentary, it’s like buttering both sides of the bread, it’s like wearing underwear under a trench coat, it simply isn’t done. However, I do a lot of things that I shouldn’t do. For instance, I was wearing only an extremely tight pair of underwear under my trench coat at the bars I frequented last evening which led to a man dumping my beer on me which led to me threatening to shake him which led to him actually shaking me because whereas I am weak and think it’s a good time to nap often he clearly thinks it is a good time to weight lift often. As well, a decade of napping and playing Dungeons & Dragons has left me with but a single equally weak friend, while a decade of lifting weights had left my opponent with many surprisingly strong friends. Bastards.
But I digress.
On Monday Tom Flanagan wrote an op-ed for the Globe & Mail. It amounts to a marvellous substitute for the horrors of genuinely interesting and useful thinking. Flanagan is right to say that during an election it is the right thing to do to reflect about the nature of our politics. It is also a good time to reflect on the nature of our political writing. Flanagan exemplifies the inability of our right wing to understand what a metaphor is.
Allow me to explain.
Flanagan lists a variety of words and concepts that describe the system by which we elect our government. Among these words are ‘campaign‘, ‘taking the field‘, the ‘war room‘, ‘the ground war‘, ’message discipline’ as rigid as that of military discipline. He further explains that there are but three systems for choosing our government, heredity, bloody civil war, or smooth persuasion, and persuasion, electoral politics, are the alternative to bloody civil war. Which serves to explain the language used to describe the process of garnering voter support during an election.
While the Clausewitz aphorism, pithy as it is, is considered accurate, reducing an election to actual warfare is disingenuous. Rather, the whole purpose of contriving to make the electoral cycle equal to warfare is to defend the Conservative Party strategy. Flanagan even goes so far as to explain how, in the sense that this is war, it is fair to impugn Ignatieff’s motives for coming back to his homeland to compete as a Liberal, and even argues that this negative characterisation is of a higher intellectual plateau than any kind of positive ad that the Conservative Party may have put out. It would take a Conservative to think that a character attack is of greater intellectual worth than a positive program for change.
The thing is, if politics is in fact war, and war isn’t simply a metaphor for the political landscape, then it might be just to use any sneaky-deaky tactic to find victory. Amongst our more cynical citizens, this is the case. I must question whether or not ideas do in fact matter, and that positive messages of hope may be less sexy, and less damaging to political opponents, the climate of warfare that characterises our southern neighbour has only served to erode genuine political discourse. I would say what we don’t want is anyone throwing around the slur of being un-Canadian except it is too late.
If we take Tom Flanagan at his word though then the misinformation and attack ads amount to a Psychological Operation, and the muscling out of moderate citizens looking to be politically informed is an attack on the liberties to congregate. Tom Flanagan wants Canadians to accept his sterile view that the truth can not be known, that we must judge on plausibility, that we must come to terms with a political dialogue that is at open war, and because of this warfare, anything is allowed. Oddly, he also places Kim Campbell and Ralph Klein on the same level as Aristotle and Cicero, all great political philosophers. Campbell helpfully explains that the worst time to talk about social programs is on campaign. Of course that might have been because of what her party wanted to do to Canadian social programs. Ralph Klein is quoted as saying that his health care reform is far too complicated to explain on campaign.
Either Kim and Ralph lack the requisite imagination and vocabulary to explain their positions, or they were strategically arguing against that kind of explanation in order to confuse the enemy. It’s difficult to say, the fog of war, you see.
Let me put it this way: It’s not fair to say that in order to sway you, the heroic reader of our beloved blog, against Tom Flanagan that he is a flatulent egg head university tight ass that probably wears incredibly tight shoes. Furthermore, it would be entirely out of order to say that Flanagan is the kind of man that wears suspenders and a belt, he can’t trust his pants you see, and it would be absolutely ridiculous to insist that he is the small man of Confederation, or that he should be hustled out of political gatherings because his face book friends are from the wrong side of the prairies. Which is why I won’t say that. That kind of writing and thinking has no place in an election, where ideas do matter, Kim Campbell is not a brilliant political philosopher, where elections are a rather excellent time to talk about the agenda of future government, and where the distinction between the nobler elements of our political discourse are given precedence over a blind emotional call to arms.
Maybe it’s not as sentimental as warfare, but a political campaign is not a war of words. It is, hopefully, a meaningful dialogue between constituents, a negotiation between ridings, a deal made between regions, and not the cruel conquering by the blessed few over the defeated and lamenting many. That is, it shouldn’t be.
And it’s true, Tommy F-dogg did use the word marvellous. The only thing that is truly marvellous is to wear sheer silk underpants underneath an excellent trench coat while writing a political blog in a café.
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