Announcing My Candidacy for the Board of COPE

March 5th, 2013

Thirteen years ago, give or take a week or two, I left the field of partisan politics in BC after losing the leadership of the BC Green Party, after seven years, by a 114-86 vote at a convention in Squamish. Had I been able to bring another 29 people to the meeting or sway 15 who voted the other way, things might have turned out differently in a few areas of my life. But, by the grace of God, they did not because I badly needed perspective and a life outside politics; and even more, I needed a break.

In the past thirteen years, I have been able to turn my attention to things other than partisan politics, from doing non- and multi-partisan activist work in the voting reform movement, to obtaining a BA, MA and PhD in history, to taking time to work on my physical and mental health. As a result, I was able to celebrate my fortieth birthday last spring as a happier person than I could ever have hoped to be, had I been burdened with the wrong kind of political success.

And it is not as though the skills and contacts that came from being a politician went to waste. I served as a director and judge for the annual awards for excellence in role playing games at Gen Con thanks to my expertise in voting systems design. My capacity to produce a stream of seemingly well-informed verbiage landed me as a regular panelist on CTS Christian TV’s open line show in Ontario and as a repeat commentator on Battlestar Galactica on the Space Channel. My skills at organizing conferences yielded the small, elite gaming convention, Giant Space Telescope Con at Algonquin Radio Observatory. And my abiding affection for and interest in weird people with weird ideas turned me into an expert on Mormon history and cosmology, on which I have spoken at conferences across Canada and the US. On the strength of that, Kofford Books, a Mormon Studies publisher is releasing my first book, History Through Seer Stones later this year.

But as I have lived the past third of my life, mostly out of partisan politics, aside from a near-miss at winning the NDP nomination for a provincial byelection in Toronto, it has become increasingly clear to me that, according to my own abilities, I cannot fully contribute to the struggles against the upward redistribution of wealth and the destruction of planetary life support systems from outside of electoral politics.

 

Since moving back to Vancouver, it has become abundantly clear that the kind of politics in which I was involved in the 1980s and 90s is desperately needed in our city. I was one of the people who celebrated when Gregor Robertson was elected as mayor and who supported many of the people and policies associated with Vision Vancouver.

The magnitude of the betrayal of the people of this city by the mayor and his cronies cannot be overstated. Vision reports a decline in homelessness because they have changed the way we determine who is homeless; now, only those who slept on the street last night are homeless. Vision reports an increase in affordable housing because they have changed the way we determine what housing is affordable; now, any space you rent – no matter the cost – is, by definition, affordable.

Here is the reality of our city under Vision Vancouver: our civic government has financed massive corporate tax cuts by imposing and increasing regressive user fees on those who need to use community facilities. Today, Vancouver taxes corporations less than any other city in North America; meanwhile, seniors, children and low-income people pay some of the highest user fees when they try to access basic services. That does not worry our current city government, however, because these are people who cannot afford to keep living here leave and are not around to vote in the next election. The people whose money is transferred through children’s swimming lesson fees at their local community centre to finance a tax cut for Walmart are outside the political calculus because Mayor Robertson is betting that they will be living in Surrey by the time he is up for re-election.

Our current civic government is presiding over a bonanza in rezonings that destroy affordable housing, affordable grocery stores, interesting cultural venues and affordable restaurants and leave in their place an undifferentiated mass of Bikram, Starbucks and Donnelly pub group franchises with Westbank and Aquilini condos piled on top of them. The speed and rapacity of this destruction is unequaled under any previous regime, including Gordon Campbell in the 80s and Tom Campbell in the 60s.

Meanwhile, our city proudly unveils essentially meaningless, symbolic efforts to make our city seem to be a world leader in sustainability and social justice. The ever-increasing private parking capacity under new developments, the overcrowded, unreliable, unaffordable bus system: we are distracted from these things by bike lanes and green roofs.

Vancouverites who are sensitive to questions of social and environmental justice are, for the most part, paralyzed by this turn of events. Villainous hypocrisy on the scale we are seeing it is something I have not seen in BC in twenty years, not since, as a young man, I watched a similar government of educated, ecologically-minded, clever people we had all been rooting for launch a blistering assault on the most vulnerable people in our society.

Then as now, the main reaction is denial. Andrea Reimer spent most of her political career as a Green. Gregor Robertson sat as an NDP MLA. Geoff Meggs was a tireless worker for the Communist Party. “How can it be?” we ask ourselves, that this government is pursuing an agenda to the right of the Non-Partisan Association? The answer is that this is the only group of people who can get away with this. Westbank and Donelly could never remake the city on this scale by cutting big cheques to the NPA because then, progressive people would not be paralyzed. They would not be in denial; they would be fighting back.

I am not a political genius. I am not a person made for or called to every political situation. But I do know what to do when a group of smooth-talking fake progressives decide to wage war on the vulnerable on behalf of vested interests and then defend themselves with meaningless greenwashing and Third Way Newspeak. I’m pretty sure I know what to do about that.

And so, I am using this blog post to announce, formally, that I will be standing as a candidate for the executive of the Coalition of Progressive Electors at the organization’s Annual General Meeting on April 7th. That meeting will be the first in a long series of battles between those willing to stand against the mayor and his supporters and those on the left who find themselves caught in an endless cycle of political cowardice, toadying and denial. From now until the end of business on Thursday, you can purchase a COPE membership[1] and join us in the fight to take back our city. I really hope that you will.

[1] Those who live or work in Vancouver, of all ages and income levels are welcome to join COPE. Visit them here at www.cope.bc.ca

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Prime Minister Mulcair and the Politics of Masculinity

January 23rd, 2013

Sometimes I feel shame when reading posts by my fellow NDP members about how great our party is. “Why can’t I do that?” I sometimes wonder. I really do want people to vote NDP next time. Obviously, there is something good enough about the party that I continue to support it despite a rocky relationship with it these past twenty-eight years. And I’m sure that some people will see this post in light of that likely-to-continue track record of disappointment, insubordination and occasional despair. But I honestly am writing this to express my enthusiasm for our leader and to emphasize my view that he has a real shot at becoming Prime Minister in 2015 — even without an electoral cooperation deal with the other opposition parties. Admittedly, I think that shot goes from about 35% with cooperation to about 8% without it but still…

Tom Mulcair has a real shot at becoming the first NDP Prime Minister because he, not Justin Trudeau, the Liberals’ inevitable future spokesmodel will actually tap into the force that elected Justin’s dad in ’68 and re-elected him in three times thereafter. And the contrast he presents to Justin — and yes, I am using the first name rather than surname technique typically used to demean female politicians here (more about that shortly) — will actually aid him in channeling that legacy.

When Mulcair won the leadership of the NDP, Canada’s political class waited with great anticipation to see what ads the Harper attack machine would run against him. The consensus, before the “risky theories” ads came out, was that the Tories would go for the most talked-about of Mulcair’s supposed character flaws, an angry, bullying, gruff nature combined with a short temper. And yet the Conservatives have made no mention of it; instead they have sought to portray him as professorial, secretive and distant.

For the same reason, I don’t expect to see any future attack ads using the December 5th 2012 footage of Mulcair bodily interposing himself between an enraged Peter van Loan and his house leader in the floor of the Commons. From the footage, it is clear that Mulcair is cussing-out van Loan and informing him that he would be only too happy to lead the next day’s news cycle being dragged out of the House for personally beating him to a bloody pulp in front of his chicken hawk Tory colleagues.

The last thing that the Tories want is to draw attention to what continues to make French Canadian men a potent force in English Canadian politics, even as the electoral relevance of Québec declines.

English Canada fell in love with Pierre Trudeau in 1968 because he angrily seated himself in the direct line of fire of bottle-throwing separatists, not with calm and decorum but in an obviously enraged response both to the separatist rioters and to the handlers who sought to whisk him off to safety. Trudeau’s healthy libido, ability to shamelessly date (and even marry) mentally unstable women less than half his age, his willingness to order the assault of protesters and roll out tanks in the streets of Montréal and his expressions of contempt, punctuated with the odd obscene gesture endeared him to crucial voting blocs in English Canada.

It was the actual Trudeau legacy that gave Jean Chretien three back-to-back majority governments, and would have given him a fourth if the Liberal Party constitution had allowed him the option of handling Paul Martin’s challenge through a single combat rather than a convention vote. It was not Chretien’s association with the Charter that won him all those seats in Ontario; it was his ability to beat intruders senseless with soapstone sculptures, joke about pepper-spraying people in unconstitutional mass arrests and put protesters in chokeholds that won him the respect of so much of English Canada.

It was not the intellect of Trudeau or the savvy political tactics of Chretien that made these men such towering figures in late twentieth-century Canada. These guys were elected and re-elected, first and foremost, for their public performance masculinity.

Since first wave maternal feminism gripped English Canada in the Victorian Era, our patriarchal authorities have come to a different cultural accommodation between ongoing rule by a male elite and the demands of feminists than those in French Canada. While both cultures remain patriarchal societies in which women fight to make inroads into the financial and political elite, the on-the-ground manifestation of this is very different.

In English Canada, men’s eligibility to join the elite is conditioned, in large measure, by their capacity to reflect the Victorian ideal of manliness exemplified in Upper Canadian culture. Like Hawaiians, Upper Canadians build their patriarchal culture around understated theatrical demonstrations of restraint, physical, emotional and sexual. Elite English Canadian men are not to shout; they are not to brawl; and, if they must engage in it, they keep their promiscuity invisible. Just ask the mayoral candidate who could have saved us from Rob Ford, Adam Giambrone, felled by what Torontonians called a sex scandal and what Parisians wouldn’t have called anything.

While I would never suggest that restraint and sensitivity have nothing to do with elite masculine status in Québec, I will suggest that they have much less to do with it. To non-elite men and women in English Canada, the relative freedom of powerful Québecois men from these standards is a powerful force, especially for non-elite men descended from Southern European immigrant communities that struggle to identify with the smallness and coldness of Anglo nuclear families and the disturbing bloodlessness of the surrounding culture. For Anglo chickenshits like Harper, aggression is often celebrated but when it is, it is always “serious business,” an exotic phenomenon; it takes a Chretien or Trudeau to indicate a real comfort with it by joking about violence (e.g. “I put pepper on my plate…”).

We remain a culture that is rooted in millennia of patriarchy. And generally, Canadians only hand majority governments to a party when one leader is able to embody the multiple definitions of masculinity that, together, comprise a majority, while the others are not. And, overall, the more bellicose, less restrained kind masculinity we find in French Canadian culture has resonance with more people in more places. It has resonance amongst working class Anglos in industrial towns; it has resonance on reserves; it has resonance in immigrant communities not yet domesticated to the passive-aggressive, restrained masculinity of neo-Victorian elites with its slut-shaming and excessive concern over female modesty. Really, the only place it doesn’t sell especially is Québec, where people are more used to it and, consequently, a good deal more tired.

But to us Anglos, a Trudeau, Chretien or Mulcair is a Tarzanesque figure, a creature from a world of which we know little, who has swung in on a vine to right wrongs and expose the hypocrisy, emptiness and veiled rage of the smug, little chess club patriarchs like Harper who run Anglo society. He can slam his fist on the table and threaten to break Peter van Loan’s nose if he steps an inch closer to Nathan Cullen — you know, that nice, mild-mannered House Leader, half a head taller than Mulcair and nearly a generation his junior.

Now, I’m sure some people will suggest this post secretly celebrates patriarchy through Mulcair and the other Francophones for whom, repressed, bourgeois Anglo men like me enviously vote from time to time. Others might suggest that I’m insulting my party and its leader by suggesting that we’ve turned against feminism. Neither is the case.

As Leonard Cohen wrote, “There is a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Just as Trudeau presided over the largest expansion of women’s rights and opportunities since the achievement of suffrage, I have great hopes for the NDP when it comes to stopping the decline in women’s fortunes under Harper and creating the kinds of material innovations that lead to real gender equality, like the nationalization of Québec’s public childcare program. It’s just kind of funny that our best shot at that in our history comes from the fact that our leader, in the eyes of more and more Canadians, “knows how to be a man.”

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The Logic of Vision’s $10,000 Fine For Homelessness

January 10th, 2013

Today, the Vision Vancouver majority on my city council has tabled a motion to enact a new bylaw to fine the homeless $10,000 for sleeping in the streets. Obviously, there is no expectation of the fine being paid. Instead, I imagine there is a belief that there is a better chance of imprisoning the homeless for repeated defiance of orders to pay fines.

Two quotations come to mind in response to this travesty of justice. The first is by Anatole France, a quotation that many housing activists are circulating today, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

The quotation most applicable to his piece, however, comes from Tom Wayman, describing the Social Credit Restraint program of 1982, “we were not to notice that in the air, a sour odour was leaking as if from a refinery upwind. It was a stench of sulphur, of worn dollar bills, of half-digested steak, belched through false smiles at the poor. Soon everyone could smell it. Some people pretended it wasn’t there.”

The reason Vision Vancouver can get away with the brutal war they have waged on affordable housing, destroying thousands of affordable units through sweetheart rezoning deals with their donors, the reason they can get away with this new bylaw, the reason they can get away with redefining homelessness to exclude every homeless person who did not sleep on the street last night is simple: they are a coalition of Greens and New Democrats. They are, by definition, as a matter of identity, progressive.

As I said in my piece of Third Wayism and the Downtown Eastside, modern “progressives” remain relevant and useful servants of capital because they can more effectively de-mobilize people who would otherwise be outraged by such measures. When Mike Harcourt’s government cut welfare rates from $547 per month to $500, prohibited job-seeking migrants from obtaining welfare for their first three months in the province, prohibited refugees from either working or receiving welfare and cut welfare for over ten thousand disabled people by 16% month, he could institute these “reforms” with few consequences. Many trade unionists, anti-poverty activists and other leftists bit their tongues and those who did speak out were marginalized within the NDP for their disloyalty.

Once this kind of silence was established, his government went on to deliberately overturn the advice of local police in 100 Mile House and turn a small farm occupation by a handful of First Nations activists into a military incident, complete with tanks, land mines and over ten thousand bullets fired at the protesters, wounding one young woman and terrorizing the other dozen protesters. Every day of the Gustafsen Lake siege, the NDP’s pet polling firm, Viewpoints Research, was in the field, testing to see how voters liked the hard line the party was taking against the Indians. When voters indicated they liked the siege but wanted an even harder line, the Attorney General ordered further escalation. Hence the BC government using land mines on its own citizens, even as Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy negotiated the international land mine ban treaty in Montréal.

Punitive actions against poor and indigenous people by wealthy social democrats have a consistent logic that, when successfully applied, helps to connect them to working class voters whom they fear might abandon them.

Living paycheque to paycheque is terrifying, as is losing your affordable shabby apartment and being forced to move to Surrey or pay $1200 per month for one of Vision’s “affordable” new bachelor units. For more and more working class, Vancouverites, Vision has gone from being the party who moderately inconveniences them by installing bike lanes that cut their pizza delivery job tips by reducing the number of deliveries per hour into a real threat. They have become a party that is systematically destroying industrial employment by rezoning and annihilating the affordable housing stock at an accelerating rate, faster than any NPA regime that has ever governed this city.

When you’re living paycheque to paycheque, facing eviction from your apartment, the sight of homeless people on the streets is disquieting, one thinks to oneself, “could that be me one day soon? I still haven’t found a home I can afford. What if I don’t find one by the end of the month?

Mike Harcourt and Gregor Robertson rely on the votes of people who look at their homeless fellow citizens with anxiety. And to keep their votes they need to do two things. First, they have to reduce the visibility of homelessness and other frightening forms of poverty. Hence the project of incarcerating the homeless.

But their second line of approach is even more dangerous. They attempt to make homelessness seem pathological and criminal. They reassure the working poor that homelessness is not something that happens to regular, law-abiding, healthy people; it is something that only happens to people who were crazy or criminal all along. They seek to transform the homeless into an alien species, a type of vermin. Hence Harcourt’s famous speech introducing his reforms, promising to crack down on those “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints.” By describing the very poor as a kind of law-breaking vermin, he helped to reassure the working poor that they couldn’t become homeless because they homeless were nothing like them, not even the same species.

Most hard-working people pride themselves on being law-abiding, so if every homeless person they encounter is, by definition, a criminal facing incarceration in the near future, they feel safer; they can believe themselves to be different from the homeless because of their law-abiding nature. Similarly, the conflation of pre-existing madness with homelessness is reassuring. Many homeless people are mad but that is often because madness and homelessness are mutually reinforcing phenomena. I know I’d go crazy if I lost my home. Right now, I’m crazier than I was a few months ago because I’m not entirely clear on where my rent money is coming from next month.

Persecuting, incarcerating, blaming and pathologizing the homeless, then, is an attempt to reassure the working poor that they cannot become homeless, first, by rendering the homeless less visible, and second, by defining them as intrinsically unlike those who still have homes.

That is why these attacks on the very poor are part and parcel of Vision’s mass renoviction strategy. Vision received the votes of 70% of the city’s renters in the last election. To maintain that support, it is crucial for them to reassure people living paycheque to paycheque that, by virtue of their nature, they could never end up begging on the street or sleeping under a bridge or in a shelter because they’re not crazy criminals. As long as people believe that homelessness is caused by character defects.

And so, Vision hopes, they feel mildly reassured as our mayor flashes his pearly whites while the homeless are dragged off to jail, out of sight and out of mind. And we can reassure ourselves that nothing too bad has happened. After all, this policy is being implemented by a team including a former NDP MLA, Canada’s first Green school trustee and a longtime Communist Party activist; it must be progressive.

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Rethinking “Community Empowerment” Part 3: Communities and Neighbourhoods: Conflate at Your Peril

January 8th, 2013

Recently, events in the organizations in which I am most involved these days have brought two crucial questions to the fore: (a) what is a community and (b) how does a community achieve representation? As the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) seeks to rebuild itself, as Fair Vote Canada struggles to deal with a fight over municipal voting reform in Toronto that threatens to engulf an entirely national movement in an ugly parochial schism, they avoid these fundamental questions at their peril.

Community, in my view, is an experience, a set of interactions that bind a group of people together. Communities are contingent upon continued interaction and interrelation; their composition is in constant flux and individuals’ interactions shift, based on their interests, location, time, tastes, politics and a host of other factors. Individuals, corporations and governments can decide to try and create communities but their success in doing so is never guaranteed because community is not prescriptive; it is descriptive of something that is taking place in the present. In other words, community is something that is done, not something that is declared.

Every day, we participate in community. Our workplaces are sometimes part of that, depending on where we work, how we work and what our colleagues are like. Similarly, depending on the kinds of families we have, this, too, is often but not necessarily a locus of community for many of us. Those of us who are part of racialized minorities are often in communities constructed along racial lines, sometimes in shared self-defense, sometimes in celebrating a history of struggle. Religious affiliation is also a major locus of community-making in our culture. Often, the communities with which we most enthusiastically engage are communities built around aesthetics, ideology or shared recreational pursuits. In my life, some of the most important communities are based around a shared appreciation of old school Doctor Who and Asian fusion cuisine, a commitment to proportional representation and to fighting poverty and climate change.

When one looks at community as a lived experience, it is hard, in a dense, urban centre, to find people who would rate their neighbourhood or their street as a major locus of community. I certainly do not. I have no shared day-to-day experience of fellowship and commonality with the overwhelming majority of people who live near me. That’s not to say I don’t care about them or that I won’t experience community in the future. But it does mean that when I do experience future community with them, it will likely not be because we are engaging around issues to do with our surroundings but because it turns out that, coincidentally, they are part of one of the communities that is real for me, because they turn out to be fellow socialists, environmentalists or Doctor Who fans.

The reality is that I experience more community, in a week, with a college instructor in Maricopa County, AZ, I have never encountered in person, whom I met through a friend of a friend of a friend in a Facebook discussion about the US 2010 midterm elections, than I do with either of my next door neighbours.

That is not to say that neighbourhood identity is not an important part of experiencing community for some of my fellow Vancouverites. In a handful of places, there exists a real sense of geographic identity and neighbourhood solidarity. But the experiences of people in places with the most intense neighborhood consciousness, the Downtown Eastside, Commerical Drive and Shaughnessy are generalized at our peril. People who live in those places are generally pretty special people who have, unlike the vast majority of Vancouverites, decided to make significant sacrifices and difficult life choices to situate themselves in one of the handful of places in the Lower Mainland where neighbourhood identity matters.

There is another group of people who experience neighbourhood as a significant form of community. They are the local — and excuse the pejorative tone of the term but nothing else will suffice — busybodies. They are people who have decided to be unlike the majority of their neighbours and get involved in organizing ratepayers’ associations, local civic festivals and government planning processes around transportation and development. But these groups should not be mistaken for people typifying or representing their neighbours; they are people who draw solidarity and generate community, who develop affinity with one another, precisely because of how unlike their neighbours they are. A residents’ association activist in Dunbar has far more in common with a residents’ association activist in Fraserview than she does with a Dunbar resident who never attends neighbourhood-focused events.

Neighbourhood activists, then, are not so much people whose experience of community is based on their neighbourhood as they are people whose experience of community is based on a shared set of political and aesthetic commitments about what neighbourhoods should be. These commitments, furthermore, are not located in the present. Neighbourhood activists are aspirational or nostalgic in their politics; they either celebrate an imagined past of neighbourhood solidarity and community or they look forward to creating such communities in future, often allied with the hundred mile diet, slow food movement, etc. While neighbourhood activists often deserve accolades for their work against gentrification, overdevelopment and a host of other ills, I do not believe we should compliment them with the concession that their theory of neighbourliness is true in the present for most people, because it simply is not.

These questions of community would merely be academic if they did not so profoundly taint our politics and the ongoing project of seeing voters represented by officials they choose, who reflect their concerns and priorities.

When I vote, I want to be able to pool my vote with people with whom I actually experience community and I want others to be able to do the same. I want my vote to be counted with people who share my environmental concerns, whether they live on Boundary Road or Oak Street; I want my vote to be counted with people who share my concerns about poverty and issues of affordability, whether they have a view of the Fraser River or Burrard Inlet. And I would be very happy for us to be represented by the same person or people in City Council.

The last thing I want is for an arbitrary polygon containing about 61,000 people to be drawn around my apartment and to be told “this is your community; your interests are those of the other 61,000; and you will all have a single representative on city council to reflect the consensus of your community.” What consensus? What community? Benedict Anderson wrote of nations as “imagined communities.” Municipal wards aren’t even that. They are imaginary communities.

How the people chosen to represent these false, nonexistent communities are chosen is of no interest to me because conceding this makes a mockery not just of community but of representation and democracy.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, forward-looking people in England came to recognize that the old voting system they had designed in 1215 to represent medieval communities, which were profoundly geographically structured, had run its course and the “limited vote” system was instituted to give the residents of the ascendant market and industrial towns a form of proportional representation, so that communities in overlapping geographic areas could enjoy concurrent representation in parliament. Unfortunately, as the nineteenth century wore on, those reforms were chipped away and people were once again shoehorned into false communities of neighbourhood as the English elite took measure to prevent the rise of labour politics and the emancipation of the working class.

The deliberate and coercive conflation of “neighbourhood” and “community” in a political system is a fundamentally conservative project. It seeks to displace voluntary and real forms of community with coercive and hypothetical forms. It alienates the majority of the populace from participation in government by ensuring (a) that they are “represented” by someone for whom they did not vote and (b) that they are alienated from elected officials with whom they might share ideological, ethnocultural or other genuine forms of community. Neighbourhood consciousness seeks to erase real cleavages in terms of ideology, class, wealth and status and replace them with a romantic myth of community that never existed. It helps to render our political conversations incoherent and to turn them away from real debates about the fundamental questions that determine the kind of city in which we live to focus on intersection signalization and potholes.

Now that is not to say that single-member wards are the worst thing that could happen to a city. It may well be that the current rigged, majoritarian, at-large system in Vancouver that can allow a party to sweep all 27 seats with only 43% of the vote, as happened in 1996, is actually worse. But having lived in Toronto with its hyper-parochial neighbourhood politics, it is not that much worse. But much more importantly, in both of these cities, we can do a lot better; we can create a voting system that actually empowers communities, that actually represents people, that facilitates, instead of repressing political debate.

It is for this reason that I have taken the position I have in the Fair Vote Canada referendum currently underway and it is for this reason that I am working hard to have COPE update its electoral reform policies and return them to the platform on which we ran in 1999.

In a future post, I will talk about some alternatives that could move us towards a civic politics that represents communities. In the interim, as I encourage you to look at the two reports I co-authored on civic democracy in Toronto in 2005 and 2008.

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Finding the Good Side of the Georgia Viaduct

December 7th, 2012

Now that I am paying more attention to civic issues in Vancouver, it’s easy to get caught up in producing an endless barrage of criticism, given the reliably disappointing set of policies and processes coming out of our hip, shiny attractive city council.

One such policy I could spend today’s column railing against is the plan to demolish the Georgia Viaduct overpass system and replace it with – you guessed it, more condos with the usual mix of designer clothing stores, Donnelly Group pubs, Starbucks coffee shops, marble-countered ice cream parlours, yoga studios and noodle houses along the ground floor. Now, far be it from me to say something bad about a new noodle house but surely, we can’t really be thinking that what Vancouver needs is more of the identical, sanitized landscape we see radiating out from the Olympic Village.

Often the case for such a move is founded on spurious environmental arguments. “Eco-density,” now rivals “clean coal,” when it comes to greenwashing bullshit terminology, or more politely, the BC dialect of Newspeak. Demolishing perfectly good infrastructure and laying down a bunch more asphalt and fill is not an ecological pursuit, nor is building a bunch more condos with a bunch more underground parking and filling them with a bunch more people. This kind of thing doesn’t save the Lower Mainland from suburban sprawl because the people buying family-friendly townhomes in Langley are not considering sea view micro-condos on False Creek or vice versa.

Nevertheless, anyone wandering through Andy Livingston Park and environs can see that Vancouver is not making the best use it can of the space around our viaducts and Skytrain guideway. So here is where I get positive.

Map of Chicago's Multi-Level Streets

Courtesy of Wikipedia, a map of Chicago’s multi-level streets.

For some reason or other I kept getting stuck in Chicago this year and while I was there, I spent a good amount of time wandering around its downtown, which contains twenty elevated streets, like North Michigan Avenue. North Michigan is the land of blue chip stores, head offices and ultra-pricey hotels, or at least that’s what is on the top layer. But underneath it is a whole separate street grid with lower-rent, more interesting establishments, establishments that help to keep downtown vibrant because their rents and taxes are lower thanks to being, literally, in the shadow of North Michigan. Because that’s one thing an overpass or viaduct can do in the centre of a city; it can create a rent shadow, an island of affordable rents in the middle of downtown.

North Michigan's Billy Goat Tavern

This business would not be possible on Upper Michigan Avenue but it’s exactly the kind of business we see underneath it.

Approaching North Michigan

North Michigan doesn’t look pretty from every angle. That’s kind of the point.

For a more local example, you can look at New Westminster’s Front Street, at least for now. Like Vancouver, New West is proposing a bunch of eco-density in place of its Front Street overpass, a real tragedy. Low rent commercial space near a downtown commercial hub is hard to create and can give rise to beautiful things. When I used to walk along Front in the 90s, it had a wonderful mix of vacant storefronts and businesses that had no business existing in a modern capitalist economy, storefront churches, galleries of unpopular and peculiar art and protracted yard sales dressed up as antique shops.

New Westminster's Front Street

There was no plan to make Front Street an interesting commercial space yet that is what it became thanks to a viaduct.

Greater Vancouver’s downtowns are rapidly losing commercial space where interesting things can happen. Musical venues and gallery spaces for artists who are not already established, experimental businesses, the very things that we supposedly love our cities for are being hunted to extinction by municipal governments who have lost sight of what actual makes for creative, vibrant urban space. And it is very rare, once the forces of gentrification begin marching, to turn that around.

But that is precisely the opportunity we have with the Georgia Viaduct. The city has the opportunity to build unconventional commercial and industrial space under the viaducts, all by ourselves, and rent it out to businesses that otherwise wouldn’t be anywhere near our downtown. This is something our government can do, all by itself.

Granville Island remains a testament to what a government can do to create good places. We didn’t contract Granville Island out to developers; instead, the government managed public land with a goal of creating something more interesting than a profit-driven private developer could, mixing industrial, artisanal and commercial space.

Imagine if, instead of knocking down our viaducts, we built under them, creating short-lease gallery space for shows and installations, light industrial artisanal and craft cooperatives, non-profit office space and other projects approved by a citizen board with a mandate to keep our downtown weird and interesting.

City councilors like Geoff Meggs have done us a favour by starting a substantive debate about our viaducts and overpasses. And they are quite right that this space is not delivering for Vancouverites. But the solution is not to destroy that space; it is to act with creativity and frugality to make it into something worthwhile.

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Vision’s Trojan Train on Broadway

November 28th, 2012

You have to hand it to Vision Vancouver for their ability to greenwash a debate. Apparently the Canada Line was such a positive experience for local taxpayers, merchants and residents that it deserves to be replicated on the Broadway corridor between Clark Drive and UBC.

As a longtime supporter of rapid transit down Broadway (my first sustained effort on that front was as campaign manager for the Green Party in the 1989 Vancouver-Point Grey byelection), I should be elated by the city’s preliminary report favouring this development in the very near future but I am not.

According to today’s Metro’s summary of the report Council warmly received, it will cost $2.8 billion to provide Broadway corridor rapid transit because the line will simply have to run through a tunnel. To run at-grade transit or elevated rapid transit, “it would remove 90 percent of parking, restrict turning at 90 percent of intersections, narrow sidewalks and chop trees.” In the city transportation director’s own words, “In fact, the entire corridor would have to be rebuilt from building face to building face.”

This apocalyptic scenario demonstrates the power of the unstated premise. Unstated in all this is the assumption that not one square centimeter of space allocated for moving private vehicles could possibly be sacrificed in order to build more environmentally friendly transportation infrastructure. Whatever public transportation gained in space would have to be seized from merchants, pedestrians and shoppers because the private car, as transportation method is untouchable.

Also unstated is the way senior bureaucrats are being asked to construct a false binary between, on one hand, a $3 billion megaproject and, on the other, a bus system already stretched beyond capacity. Off the table is the original elevated Skytrain technology with angle parking underneath. Similarly, all the work done in eliminating turning restrictions pioneered by the Toronto Transit Commission on the St. Clair streetcar route in the last decade is carefully ignored. It’s an expensive, completely unnecessary tunnel or nothing.

This makes me very suspicious of Vision Vancouver’s real intentions when it comes to Broadway rapid transit. So I have decided to conduct a small thought experiment: let us assume Vision knows the intellectual sleight of hand in which it is engaged, and let’s assume that they have a clear recollection of the various fiascos associated with the Canada Line. What might their actual goals be with this “go big or go home” position on Broadway transit?

1. Renoviction of Small Independent Merchants: Our city government’s current position is being justified to small business owners as defending them from a hypothetical loss of parking and sidewalk space. But, as so many current (and sadly former) merchants on Cambie Street can attest, the biggest threat to small, local business is tunneling. While big box stores, chains and large businesses can afford a complete multi-month shutdown of the street while a tunnel is dug, small businesses lack the liquidity to do the same.

Once the tunnel is complete, only the richest, least local merchants will be left standing. So we can reasonably conclude that plans for another cut and cover tunnel will be what causes and not what prevents “the entire corridor [being] rebuilt building face by building face.” Vision’s developer friends can look forward to another bonanza of redevelopment caused by government-facilitated property value inflation and weakened local merchants.

2. New Car Capacity: Currently, buses occupy a significant portion of the pavement on Broadway, crowding and slowing private vehicle traffic. In Vision’s plan, this would be literally swept under the rug as all impediments to a private motor vehicle monopoly on Broadway would be buried at great expense. Vancouver’s civic government could finally live down its courageous bike lane plan by handing a mixed-use street exclusively to the private car.

3. Public-Private Partnerships: The great thing about coming up with a really expensive big-ticket item is that “other revenue sources” are immediately on the table. By cranking the initial price tag up to just shy of $3 billion, a tremendous appetite can be created to look for “innovative” funding methods. While P3s (public-private partnerships) are more than a generation old in Canada, their supposedly innovative character remains part of the public discourse. Under Larry Campbell and COPE-lite/proto-Vision, a $1.8 billion asset was handed to a private company for anteing up a mere $300 million, along with the guarantee that if they couldn’t manage to make money off it, local government would replace their profits through a direct transfer of tax revenue.

But our civic government has had a decade to learn since their first tentative steps back in the early days of the Canada Line. By closely pairing new transit with the breakneck up-zoning of the city, stations could be financed through zoning variances and development mega-projects. Tunneling could be leveraged with for-profit underground parking to help feed the new pavement being placed at the disposal of private cars. New condos could be given preferential access to stations and associated commercial space could be placed within the envelope of the fare-paid zone as we have begun to see on the Canada Line. Hundreds of millions in “savings” could be delivered through special deals with developers to finance an otherwise-unaffordable option.

This trial balloon for privatization, overdevelopment, increased car capacity and another concerted assault on the diversity of Vancouver’s storefronts is being floated in the name of green transportation and sustainability. Transit advocates need to reach out to a broad coalition to stop Vision’s hidden agenda. Small businesses, renters, students and environmentalists must come together to reject the latest mass stealth renoviction scheme before it acquires too much momentum and affordable rental housing and local businesses collapse into a giant cut-and-cover pit the way they have on growing swaths of Cambie Street.

Vancouver Renters’ Union’s Tristan Markle recently called for the reinvigoration of the Bus Riders’ Union over the latest round of fare-gouging. Here is yet another reason such an organization is desperately needed today.

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Don’t Celebrate Rob Ford’s Deposition Too Hard

November 26th, 2012

This morning my Facebook feed has lit up with left and liberal friends celebrating the court-ordered deposition of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford. Although I knew Ford would be a terrible mayor, vigorously encouraged strategic voting in order to block his election and strongly agree with the court’s decision, I lack any of the sense of triumph so many of my friends are displaying. That doesn’t mean I feel sorry for Ford or sympathize with him in any way. He was and remains an incompetent, bullying liar who has worsened the lives of Toronto’s poor, unionized workers, cyclists, transit riders, youth and seniors during his short reign as mayor.

When describing him to non-Torontonians, my usual shorthand has been to say that Ford was a character Chris Farley would inevitably have created had he lived long enough, a piece of Saturday Night Live sketch comedy come to life in Canada’s largest and most arrogant city. I pointed out that no one was more surprised than Ford, himself, that he was unable to make good on his election promise to fund $23 billion worth of new spending with $10 million worth of cuts or that simply saying “new subway lines will be built by the private sector,” did not result in private construction firms constructing free subways all over the city.

Nothing about Rob Ford the politician was an act; he was just as stupid, just as ignorant, just as confused, just as flustered as he seemed, unclear even on his last day on the job as to the most basic information about what it entailed. Ford was deposed for the simple reason that he believed that attaining the office of mayor emancipated him from all rules governing his city’s other 2.5 million residents. In my view, he sought the office of mayor so that he could finally be free of conflict of interest rules, traffic laws, the Criminal Code, and the various other laws under which he had chafed his whole adult life. And, like most of his other beliefs about how the world works, this was demonstrated to be false.

So why am I not joining my friends in celebrating his court-ordered removal from office?

Despite his abandonment by nearly every serious conservative in Toronto, including members he appointed to his own executive committee, Ford has maintained a sizeable following, according to polls, about 30% according to Angus Reid’s most recent survey. Those who support him are the kind of people to whom leftists once sought to appeal. They make less money; they have less education; they live in the least-serviced neighbourhoods; their apartments and homes cost less; and they are deeply distrustful of elites. And what I find most unsettling in my friends’ opinions is their relief at Toronto’s anticipated return to business as usual.

In 2010, Ford appealed far beyond Stephen Harper supporters and the small number of Torontonians who actually believed the previous government was corrupt or lavish in its spending. Nearly half of Toronto residents voted for him because of his populist rejection of the way Toronto had been run since its founding by conservative war refugees in the late eighteenth century. The United Empire Loyalists and Family Compact set a tone of high-handed, patronizing elitism that has defined Toronto’s governing class ever since.

During the six years I lived in the city, what struck me was that, like the Roman and American senatorial classes, this crew seemed to control every political faction, movement or party that had any real shot at power, providing an extraordinary continuity in the basic principles of governance that prevailed in the city. Not until Mike Harris’s dramatic break with this tradition at the provincial level was this hegemony threatened. By forcibly amalgamating Toronto with the four suburban municipalities that surrounded it, Harris was able to drown temporarily drown the old Anglo elites in immigrants and suburbanites to destabilize the city’s political culture and give those outside a certain class of educated Anglos real, as opposed to tokenistic, access to the city’s levers of power.

By the time I moved to Toronto, the mayoralty of Mel “what is this World Health Organization!?” Lastman had ended and Toronto had returned to its political traditions under the leadership of Harvard-educated social democrat, David Miller, traditions eloquently described by former mayor David Crombie during a dispute over the City of Toronto Act. Speaking against this new legislation expanding the powers of the mayor’s office, Crombie lectured council, “You have forgotten what your job is as city councilors. It is not your job to run this city. It is your job to listen to the people who run this city and follow their advice.” Western rube that I was at the time, I thought, initially, that he was talking about the voters but he soon made himself clear: the city was run by career civil servants who were far better-educated and better-informed than mere elected officials, whose job, I took it, was to report potholes and overflowing waste bins to them.

Toronto, in Crombie’s vision, was a mandarinate, a complex system that needed to be run by an elite group of technocrats who could guide it far better than some hypothetical uneducated immigrant councilor from North York. The debate between Miller and Crombie was over how to run a proper mandarinate; Miller believed that, as a man better-educated and more qualified than the mandarins, he should govern and manage the system directly. Crombie, with a longer view, correctly discerned that Torontonians could not be trusted always to elect men like Miller and himself and that safeguards needed to remain in place to prevent it from devolving into full-on democracy.

So my problem is this: the people who backed Ford were not ignorant fools; they were people who, for the most part, chose to vote against the mandarinate, despite the deep flaws in the candidate who emerged to challenge it. On the other hand, those who welcome his removal with the most enthusiasm seem to be expressing support for the return of elite governance. At last, they seem to say, we can get back to having the city governed by qualified condo-dwelling technocrats and make sure that we never again have to chafe under the rule of an uneducated suburbanite from a low-income ward.

The upset Ford caused the constituency David Brooks terms “bourgeois bohemians” extended far beyond his policies to what he represented culturally. Like George W. Bush, Ford adopted working class cultural mores because he simply could not master the cultural affectations of the haute bourgeois class into which he was born. While he was not, himself, a man of the people, it seems that what rendered Ford most objectionable to his critics was his sincere embrace of proletarian culture and values. It was his weight, his love of sports, his lack of emotional reserve, his lack of education and his big, noisy parties that pushed people over the edge. Leftists and liberals certainly found Ford’s policy similarities to Stephen Harper infuriating but I am left with the disquieting feeling that they found his stylistic similarities to Hugo Chavez equally upsetting.

And that is the tragic legacy of Rob Ford. As an assault on Toronto’s mandarinate, his regime has been a dismal failure. The only significant group he has managed to marginalize has been unionized city employees working in the dwindling handful of decent-paying manual labour jobs in the city. Meanwhile, the credibility of suburbanites, low-income voters and of populism, itself, have suffered enormously. And once again, people who imagine themselves to be socialists have come to identify ever more closely not just with liberal elites but with elitism, itself.

There is nothing, wrong, in itself, with electing a mayor who comes from a poor and underserviced part of town, instead of the self-consciously hip downtown core. There is nothing wrong, in itself, with electing an autodidact with no university credits under her belt. In fact, there is much right about these things, if we truly believe in the social democracy of Rosa Luxembourg. The mandarins whose grip on the city will once again tighten do not see such people as full citizens, much less potential mayors, of the city. They are people to be managed, patronized and gently guided until the forces of gentrification push them into some adjacent, less hip suburb.

Rob Ford’s election was an angry, desperate cry from Torontonians who feel marginalized and unheeded by downtown elites of all political stripes. Leftists would do well not to join these elites in crowing overmuch about their triumph over the suburban rabble and its unlikely champion. Instead, we should ask how it is that we are welcoming a return to Torontonian normalcy instead of beating the bushes for a better champion to challenge the heirs to the Family Compact.

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The Age of Authenticity: Part IIIb: Authenticity as National Reconciliation

November 9th, 2012

Here is the final part of my four-parter on the Age of Authenticity. It’s going to be the last of my blog’s Am-con for some time. First, let me begin by recapping:

In Part One, I introduced the idea that what many of us see as an ideological or demographic split in America is actually an epistemological split. In other words, what Americans are really at each other’s throats over is how society should decide what is and is not true. Unlike other industrial democracies, America has a substantial minority within its population who do not just reject the epistemology that became mainstream in the nineteenth century as a result of the Enlightenment but who practice new methods of deciding what the truth is. I suggested some distinctive aspects of early US history that may help to explain why Americans are rejecting the Age of Reason in favour of a new Age of Authenticity.

In Part Two, I explained how Authenticity works as an alternative to Reason when it comes to day-to-day epistemology. Those of us rooted in the Age of Reason check the truth of a statement for two things: external evidence and internal consistency. Authentic thinkers, on the other hand, check statements against their gut feelings. Instead of comparing claims to the world outside, they compare claims against their feelings, trusting that if something feels like a lie, it probably is.

In Part Three, I turned to recent history and demonstrated how Authenticity was not originally a conservative approach but instead one that came out of the New Left and Counterculture.

While religious conservatives had grown deeply suspicious of reason and science, they lacked an alternative epistemology with which to challenge dominant views. But all that would change in the mid-1970s.Watergate did not just trigger a national nervous breakdown because of the naked, petty criminality of a president; it universally dramatized what the counterculture had been claiming for years: the authoritative white men in the suits are lying, lying about Vietnam, about the election, the whole deal. The Republican Party would survive; Voltaire’s bastards would not. Nixon, the last liberal president, Kissinger, the last foreign policy realist – they were the kind of men rendered obsolete by Watergate.

America was also fatigued, disillusioned and, most importantly, divided in other ways. The renewed sectional conflict between North and South with the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act left a nation divided, as did the culture wars over sexual morality and a host of other questions. The Born-Again movement constituted a genuine fusion of conservative fundamentalism and the counterculture. And as a genuine synthesis, the Born-Again movement provided a path equally open to hippies and squares, Klansmen and Freedom Riders, liberals and conservatives.

In any state that had gone through traumatic disestablishment in the nineteenth century, a religious movement would have lacked the institutional capacity to effect the cultural transformation it did in America. But in the US, there existed the institutional infrastructure needed to universalize countercultural ideas that most Americans would have rejected out of hand, had they come via any other social formation. Just as Authenticity saved an embattled conservative Christianity besieged on all sides by urbanization, sexual liberation and a host of ills; it also saved and popularized an equally embattled countercultural ethic of trusting one’s feelings as a more legitimate source of truth than the man in the suit with the fancy degree.

Popular, well-attended, self-sufficient churches were not the only piece of uniquely American social infrastructure needed to confer a critical mass on the episteme of Authenticity. There was also the American party system formed in the Age of Jackson. Whether because, in the case of Germany and Italy, mass membership in political parties recalled an ugly past or, in the case of Australia and Canada, civic culture had never involved true mass parties, or, more generally, turning political parties into socially comprehensive, capacious institutions evoked the one-party states of Eastern Europe, nowhere in the West, save America, had a party system that entailed political parties having millions of active members. The creation of the primary system in the Progressive Era, making political party membership free and using the apparatus of government to recruit and track party members set American democracy on a different course than the rest of the world.

America, in other words, possessed a public square in a way that the rest of the industrialized world did not; and as states increasingly adopted mass primaries and open caucuses from the 1960s onward, this square grew and not just by virtue of scale. Authenticity served to magnify its participatory and leveling features. For those in the Age of Reason, participation in politics was typically justified either as arising from trust in a particular individual, typically a candidate for office, based on putative ideological accord or as arising from one’s own civic literacy. In the Age of Authenticity, civic literacy vanishes as a concept because to react is to know; all people are civically literate. To admit civic literacy as a category is, for Authentic Americans, an elitist position.

And Americans uncomfortable with this idea typically act to entrench it. Opposing authenticity is the idea that experts are trustworthy and that good decisions come from the application of expertise to data. Bill Clinton’s Democratic convention speech in 2012 had such a profound effect on the election because offered a middle way between the epistemic polarities that have arisen in the present day. Hewing to the original spirit of the Age of Reason, he invited Americans to reason together, by saying things like “I’ve recently noticed something. And you probably have too.” Instead of a choice between the democratic ethos of Authenticity on one hand and the elitist ethos of technocracy on the other, he offered Americans the Enlightenment thinking of Thomas Paine, arguing that all that is required for civic literacy is to apply reason to data, the birthright of all Americans, irrespective of expertise. But the extraordinary character of his speech serves only to indicate just how far America’s epistemic split has gone.

Another factor in Authenticity achieving its critical mass was consciousness of decline. Consciousness of decline is distinct from actual decline, often with minimal correlation. The combined effects of defeat in Vietnam, stagflation, the Oil Crisis, epidemic violent crime, the Russian oil boom and the decline in relative white male status compared to other groups helped to render belief in America’s decline mainstream and prevalent. Belief that Rome was destroyed from within by “decadence” and sloth rather than Christian anti-intellectualism certainly helped to fuel the 1970s decline consciousness of the US, yielding a nationalistic reason to retreat in the face of data and seek metrics other than GDP for the greatness of America.

The priests of reason had few ideas for the US to overcome its malaise whereas Authenticity pointed a clear way forward: the purification of the private and national self through moral uprightness and honesty. Born Again Christians, whether former Jesus Freaks in Haight-Ashbury or former Klansmen in Selma flocked in droves to support the presidential bid of one of their own, Jimmy Carter through the Democratic primaries. But Carter let them down; the malaise, pessimism and respect for expertise only intensified in his presidency, resulting in the constituency’s shift to the Republicans by 1980.

But the legacy of the founding generations of the American republic goes beyond mobilization processes and structures. The consciousness of which the Authentic partake is also shaped by the nation’s founding documents. As I suggested in the first part of this essay, America’s canon, the Declaration, Constitution and Federalist Papers are not so much a reflection of a new individualistic political ethos as textual evidence of the process by which that consciousness was haltingly thought into being. Freedom of religion applied to states, towns, congregations and/or persons; the right to bear arms applied to states, towns, militias and/or persons.

As Cat Stevens’ answer within directed Authentic Americans to turn away from data-based texts grounded in the present-day physical and social sciences and back to documents whose symbolic value was so powerful as to transcend their contents, and as major religious debates moved out of denominations and into parties and political action committees, a historically decontextualized reading of the nation’s founding documents further reinforced the Authentic episteme. The deep uncertainty on the part of the nation’s founders about where the self stops and the world begins allowed Authenticity to develop a political program beyond electing the honest and virtuous to office. The ambivalence of freedom of religion settled by the courts in the century from the 1860s to the 1960s was back. Freedom of religion could well mean imposing religious uniformity on one’s community because Authenticity is also about destabilizing the place the Age of Reason fixed the self-world boundary.

One’s “rights,” an Enlightenment concept appropriated by Authenticity, unmoored from a stable standard for bounding the self, allows one to reach within to generate a vision not simply of how the individual should live in order to feel authentic but of how society must be restructured and remade in order to enact these rights. And Authenticity provides a clear, if completely flexible standard for checking on whether one’s rights are being impinged upon; it is simply, “do you feel good now?” If not, the political program necessary to align the interior self with the outside world must expand in both its ambition and its coercive power.

Until recently, debates about the state regulation of human sexuality have typically been underpinned by arguments about public order. Junk sociology was offered to explain how gay marriage, having children out of wedlock, etc. caused social decay, crime and chaos. But today, these debates have taken on a new simplicity. Just as the rise of Authenticity has made it easier for gay people seeking equal rights to argue that their subjective experience of love constituted a sufficient justification for legal marriage, there has been a corollary. The fact that gay people getting married causes some people emotional upset and makes them feel like their marriage is less special and important has, likewise, become sufficient reason to oppose equality. Arguing sociology is passé.

Just as importantly, a closer reading of the American Constitution indicates a chaotic consciousness on the part of the nation’s founders about whether the exercise of one’s personal religious freedom could entail the state-driven coercion of others, to the extent that the consciousness is even organized enough to perceive these things as clearly distinct. And religion is not the only area where this is true; the indistinctly bounded self of the founders’ consciousness renders Authenticity fundamentally social. Being authentic may even entail shooting other people based on the bad feelings we have about them.

If Authenticity functions by comparing the world against the interior self, solipsism is socialized, re-forming religious and political communities based on predictable, shared experiences of emotional grievance. Such communities are far more durable because they unite people based on emotional constitution rather than specific actions or goals.

Despite heavily pandering to the most authentic in American society, Mitt Romney was unable to win the US presidential election not because he ran one of the most dishonest presidential campaigns of the past century but because he ran one of the most inauthentic. The incongruence between Romney’s statements and objective evidence was an asset when it came to campaigning. Authentic Americans were unable to fully engage with his campaign not because he asserted that the president has ended work requirements for welfare funding and raised everyone’s personal income taxes but because it appears that there was a discrepancy between his assertions and his feelings.

Authentic people are not stupid. They are just as intelligent as Reasonable people; they just use that intelligence to detect lying instead of using it to detect falsehood. And it was clear to them that Romney was a liar because he did not believe what he said when he was saying it. The problem was not the discrepancy between Romney’s claims and empirical evidence but the discrepancy between his interior narrative and the one he presented to the country.

In 2012, the palpable racism and misogyny of many Republicans and the ambition of one very rich man saved Americans from a fully authentic federal government. It may be a long time before a coalition organizing around Authenticity can seize national political power. But regardless, America’s epistemic realignment will continue: facts and feelings will draw closer together; selves will become larger and more permeable; hypocrisy will continue its ascent to becoming the most loathsome and repugnant of all sins; and the sun will continue to set on the Age of Reason.

This will continue, at least, until we recognize that Authenticity is something bigger, scarier and more powerful than simple ignorance, stupidity or over-sensitivity. It might feed on those character flaws but it is something far more: it is a universally available alternative way of making sense of the world. And we can only hope to challenge it once we recognize its power and magnitude.

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Rethinking “Community Empowerment” Part 2: “Talk and Evict” Comes to Vancouver

November 4th, 2012

In recent days, I have heard from activists concerned about the systematic renoviction that it is as though the Vancouver’s ruling Vision party is working at cross purposes with itself. On one hand, it is pursuing the most aggressively pro-development, pro-demolition agenda in the city’s history, far more expansive and ambitious than Gordon Campbell’s NPA-sponsored development orgy of the late 80s and early 90s. On the other, it has undertaken one of the most ambitious, comprehensive public consultation processes the city has ever seen around issues of governance, planning and development. Local area planning and citizen engagement processes seem to be a genuine priority for Gregor Robertson and his council majority and, throughout the city, neighbourhood activists concerned about densification, demolition, renoviction and gentrification are being actively courted as stakeholders in creating official local area plans.

To comprehend these moves, on one hand, accelerating development and, on the other, actively involving its opponents in creating the government’s official long-term plans for their neighbourhoods, as contradictory is to misunderstand how Third Way governments use public consultation processes.

But first, a brief word about Third Way-ism generally.

Third Way-ism is a fairly young political tradition. Developed by Britain’s “New” Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 1990s, it became the label under which previously social democratic parties could enact conservative or neoliberal policies. In a post-Cold War world, where the incentive for corporate capital to tolerate the existence of welfare states had suddenly disappeared, Third Way-ism was nothing short of essential to the survival of First World social democratic parties, as well as that of centrist brokerage parties like the US Democrats and Canadian Liberals.

For the forces to transnational capital to tolerate the continued viability of these parties, they did not merely need to hew closely to conservative ideology and governance practices on key issues; they needed to show they had real utility for conservative business elites. It was not enough to simply be less enthusiastic corporate toadies; they needed to produce a net benefit. Almost every Third Way party that has remained politically relevant since 1991 can demonstrate that it has implemented some part of the program of deregulation, privatization and upward distribution of income more effectively than a competing conservative party would have.

From 1991 to 1996, British Columbia was ruled by an explicitly Third Way government, that of premier Mike Harcourt. Harcourt was a key early leader in developing the emerging movement’s ideology and rhetoric. Elected on an explicit promise to business leaders that his government would offer “business as usual,” he out-performed this promise significantly, enacting an impressive set of conservative reforms in the second half of his term.

In the fall of 1993, Harcourt delivered a major televised province-wide address, presented as a course correction from what conservative media had portrayed as his government’s left-wing sympathies. The centerpiece of this address was a vow to crack down on BC’s “welfare cheats, deadbeats and varmints,” a threat on which his government made good through a poor-bashing legislative agenda so punitive and draconian that significant portions of it were struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The Harcourt course correction was, in many ways, more durable and effective when it came to environmental policy precisely because it lacked the public bellicosity of his government’s welfare policies. Beginning in 1991, the Harcourt government had begun steadily increasing the number and scope of land use consultation processes in the province. Land Resource Use Plan (LRUP) roundtables overlapped with Land Resource Management Plan (LRMP) roundtables which, in turn, overlapped with Commission on Resources and Environment (CORE) roundtables; there were also CRIMP tables and a host of others I don’t remember, buried under a deluge of Harcourt-era acronyms. What I remember is this: after the disaster of Clayoquot Sound, when I and 803 other British Columbians were arrested trying to protect old growth forests, there was an even greater abundance of opportunity to sit on government round tables on environmental policy. It seemed that for every new, committed activist on environmental issues, there was a seat at a table somewhere to participate as a “stakeholder” in land use planning.

These stakeholder panels, where environmentalists engaged in interminable debates with full-time salaried employees from the logging and mining sectors were not a reward or concession by the government. They were a demobilization campaign. First, they absorbed as many volunteer hours as the movement could throw at them. Time and money that would otherwise be invested in public campaigning, lawsuits, civil disobedience, rallies, running in elections and other forms of witnessing and organizing was systematically diverted into an endless series of meetings. The conclusions of these meetings, then, were conferred additional legitimacy; they had the stamp of approval of the environmental groups that participated, even though most of their conclusions were either pre-determined by Harcourt’s cabinet or subsequently modified by it.

Most perniciously, logging of the most hotly-contested areas continued while these panels met about their fate. More clear-headed environmental leaders saw the government’s tactics for what they were and called the strategy “talk and log,” because Harcourt’s hope was that by the time you finished talking about a place, it would already have been logged. You see: it turns out that the best way to stop citizens from mobilizing to stop something bad in their community is to absorb them in labour-intensive, yet toothless public consultation processes. That insight and their continued ability to sucker otherwise clear-headed activists into these processes keeps parties like the 1990s NDP and present-day Vision Vancouver relevant — they deliver something valuable to corporate elites more effectively than any conservative party could: a demobilized citizenry.

In order for Vision’s “talk and demolish” or “talk and evict” scheme to work, it is crucial for the city government to increase people’s enthusiasm for and involvement in local area planning processes. Without housing and neighbourhood activists absorbed in consultation, we might see the kind of audacious activism that characterized resistance to Vancouver’s late 90s demolition bonanza, when seniors in my neighbourhood, like Betty Tangye, broke into construction sites and sabotaged equipment. To keep the next generation of Tangyes from joining groups like the Mainlander, the city needs to provide an infinite supply of stackable, padded metal chairs, finger sandwiches, coffee, felt markers, flip charts and trained facilitators of small break-out groups, along with a reasonably convincing narrative for participating. Otherwise, the mass renoviction of tens of thousands of low- and middle-income Vancouverites might not proceed so smoothly.

While not just the term but the concept of “talk and log” has tragically faded from the activist left’s political lexicon, I would be stunned if the Vision members of council had the same degree of amnesia. Of the two smartest, most talented members of council, one was a key operative in the governments that honed talk and log as a strategy in the 1990s; another was one of its sharpest critics. They understand exactly what they are doing.

Vision Vancouver has received the enthusiastic financial support of the city’s developers not simply because the party’s policies are acceptable to them but because a Vision government can deliver better than any conservative regime when it comes to demobilizing and effectively silencing those who might stand in the way of their systematic destruction of an affordable, mixed-income city. All this consultation, all this planning is not a concession to progressives; it is a method of greasing the wheels for development.

Of course, once those wheels are fully greased, Vision councilors, with their trade union and environmental movement ties, will find that they, like the community activists they have hornswoggled into their non-binding consultation processes, have become dispensable. For just as our current civic government plays to the worst impulses in community activists, vanity, self-importance, desire for attention and belief that they know better than others, they themselves are being hoodwinked in exactly the same way by the real masters of the city into doing dirty work that nobody else is qualified to do.

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What I Wish Obama Would Say in Tonight’s Debate

October 16th, 2012

Here is what I wish Obama would say in tonight’s debate:

“Governor Romney, when you become the presidential nominee for one of our two great political parties, you enter into a sacred trust with the American people, to honestly represent your plans for America so that they can make a clear, reasoned choice.

John McCain, George W. Bush, his father, Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan — all of them had the courage and decency to put your party’s ideas forward honestly so that Americans could make a clear choice in a contest of ideas. But you are depriving Americans of that same chance by not being honest and constantly changing your story.

You, Governor, have big, audacious ideas, ideas I don’t agree with, just like I didn’t agree with President Bush’s or Senator McCain’s ideas. But they are your ideas. Unfortunately, you lack the courage those men displayed because you won’t honestly present your ideas to the American people and let them pass judgement. Instead, you are misrepresenting both your ideas and mine, trying to confuse Americans about what they are voting for. And that breaks the sacred trust that has existed between the American people and every Republican presidential candidate since Abraham Lincoln campaigned on a platform of free soil, free people and an indivisible union.

Americans need a clear choice in this crucial election. And they will have one, if you can find the courage to be honest with them. And let them make their choice based on the two competing visions we are offering this country.

But if you won’t do that, the American people have reminded me in the past week that it is my responsibility, as their president, to tell them what you really stand for and why the stakes are so high. And that is a responsibility I won’t shirk, even if you shirk your responsibilities as the GOP’s nominee.”

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