David Frum piling it deeper

[Parrcrow]

so much bullshit to pander to the American right wing. I always get the feeling that what he is essentially saying is; "Your country is better than mine, please accept me!"

His piece in the NYT today is a case in point. Take a petty scandal and use it to argue that Canada lacks political sophistication.



I LOVE Canada: It's so clean!" Visiting Americans may be about to lose their favorite cliché about their chilly neighbor. Over the past few weeks, a judicial inquiry in Montreal has heard charges that Canada's governing Liberal Party was running a system of extortion, embezzlement, kickbacks and graft as dirty as anything Americans might expect to find in your run-of-the-mill banana republic.

snip

What they don't see is how precarious political support for this alternative utopia has become among Canadian voters in recent years. From World War II until the 1980's, Liberal power rested on two political facts: its dominance in French-speaking Quebec and its popularity in the immigrant communities of urban Ontario.

snip

Unlike their supposed analogues, the Democrats in the United States or Great Britain's Labor Party, Canada's Liberals are not a party built around certain policies and principles. They are instead what political scientists call a brokerage party, similar to the old Italian Christian Democrats or India's Congress Party: a political entity without fixed principles or policies that exploits the power of the central state to bribe or bully incompatible constituencies to join together to share the spoils of government.

As countries modernize, they tend to leave brokerage parties behind. Very belatedly, that moment of maturity may now be arriving in Canada. Americans may lose their illusions about my native country; Canadians will gain true multiparty democracy and accountability in government. It's an exchange that is long past due.


the full article

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/opinion/19frum.html?th&emc=th

[iverglas]

1. weirdly

I find Frum's characterization of the Liberal Party to be pretty bang on.

I do tend to disagree with his conclusions. It seems to me that the Liberal Party has just been more successful at what every right-wing party in the world would love to be able to do. Hold onto power, run the show, and secure the spoils for themselves. They, not the more extremist manifestations of the right wing, are the modern ones. And the current scandal is an example of them blowing it (and obviously still small potatoes compared to things, oh, the contracts relating to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Frum of course doesn't include in his math).

Perhaps this is because the stakes in Canada are lower than in the US, and so everybody has been willing to settle for less than the current Republican mob in the US wants to amass, for instance. Perhaps the Liberals just have a better understanding of the fact that people really can't be kept impoverished and brutalized forever, and that stability is more useful than more millions of dollars, in the long run. They know it is in their interests to maintain a certain level of respect for other people's interests, in their policies.

Now that they've blown it, we might all suffer. Frankly, I don't have a lot of problem with "brokerage parties" in the current/local stage of human development, i.e. capitalist liberal democracy -- which, of course, I do not regard as "the end of history". Relatively prosperous stability with freedom is likely a lot more conducive to human progress than a cycle of exploitation/oppression and revolution.

Canadian society, methinks, has been evolving fairly nicely for quite a while, taking a long and broad view of it. Nobody, not even the Liberal Party, can stop evolution and progress. For now, they've given us as much prosperous stability and freedom as is in their interests, and either they evolve with society as it demands more, or they lose power. Or they fuck up and the resulting vacuum might be filled by something that should have been an ugly anachronism.

Don't get me wrong. I still despise Liberals. But I also recognize that Canadian society as a whole, and various of its members, are still not completely evolved (as if such a thing were possible), and are not prepared to do what has to be done to eliminate the very real exploitation and oppression that exist. I can't make it happen, any more than Democrats in the US could make people vote for Kerry, no matter how stupid and evil it plainly was to vote for Bush. So I really do wish the Liberals hadn't fucked up quite so badly this time. The results could be very nasty, since any voters who didn't already know what scum Liberals are obviously aren't equipped to deal with that knowledge now that they have it. ;)

The one thing that people will not stand for in their leaders is corruption. This is true throughout human history and geography. The trick that leaders who want to exploit people have to remember is to keep that veneer of necessity and morality on their corruption -- keep the people believing that it's for their own good that they pump their labour into the economy for someone else's benefit, that it's only fair that the owners of the capital reap that benefit.

It's pretty hard to persuade anybody that the profits reaped in the current spot of bother did anybody any good except Liberals, or were in any way a fair return on investment. The short-term greed of some stupid people obviously triumphed over the long-term benefits that intelligent exploiters keep their eyes fixed on. As so often happens.