Skip to content

All posts by fusangite - 16. page

Neo-Ottoman America and the Need for Bernie Sanders

[Today, I am opening a Patreon page to support this blog because you will be getting five articles per month henceforth. Please consider supporting my work and the distinctive historical analysis I bring to my writing here – S.P]

In the Mike Leigh movie High Hopes (1988), Rupert, a character representing nostalgic, as opposed to Thatcherite, Toryism explains the greatness of the British Empire that he hopes to see restored: there was “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.” This is an effective characterization of the Second British Empire that emerged following the recognition of the American republic in 1784 and entered into terminal decline following the outbreak of the First World War, two hundred and thirty years later.

Unlike the First British Empire (1536-1783), in which great expense and brutality were undertaken to convert Irishmen into Protestant Englishmen, in which legal differences between the English and Scots were systematically worn down, in which a million colonists on the Atlantic Seaboard originally rose up over their inequality with the Englishmen of the Eastern Hemisphere, the Second British Empire rejected assimilation as a doctrine. The reason America had risen up was because its residents had come to understand themselves to be entitled to the same rights as those of Great Britain.

So, the Second British Empire became all about difference. Welsh, Scots and Indians were to be understood as colonized peoples and, at the same time, colonizers on behalf of the British: distinct, inferior, yet powerful colonized peoples. The Welsh were massively over-represented in the colonial administration of India, the Scots in British North America and the Indians in the administration of Africa. One colonized people managed another at the level of the imperial state.

But below them were hierarchies of the colonized, recognized and supported by the imperial state. In this way, the British abandoned the project of Protestantizing Québec and instead empowered local bishops to sit at the top of a theocracy that ran Lower Canada until 1960. In India, dozens of principalities and emirates dominated or snuffed-out by the Mughal Empire regained a nominal independence under the British East India Company and, later, the British Raj, each with its own prince, courtiers and set of laws. The “trucial states” of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, Qatar, Dubai and less-remembered names were monarchies selected by the British to rule their populations independently but backed by the power of the Royal Navy.

The Second British Empire was based on the understanding that hegemonic power arises from recognizing as many kinds of people and as many kinds of peoples as possible and, wherever possible, making their elites not competitors but collaborators in a vast and elaborate system, one offering “a place for everyone and everyone in his place.”

These ideas did not come to the British Empire out of nowhere. They came from the systems of government developed by the Ottoman Empire, the first modern state more committed to systematizing than erasing the traditions and hierarchies of the past. The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in claiming the title both of Caliphate and Roman Empire during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries by modernizing and systematizing the things that had made medieval Islamic civilization the juggernaut that it had been: religious diversity, cosmopolitanism and hierarchy.

The Ottomans were the one modern state that sought to reinvigorate a legal principle of the Ancient World: personality of law. From Spain to France to England to Japan, the other ascendant states of the early modern world were interested in processes of assimilation, homogenization and the tying of law and culture to geography. These states assailed minority languages and religious difference in an effort to forge the first true national identities.

But the Ottomans took the opposite approach, instead reinvigorating institutions and practices that had atrophied in the Middle Ages. Self-government rights for linguistic minorities were restored. The milet system, whereby religious minorities governed themselves, was established throughout the Empire, granting Nestorians, Chalcedonians, Orthodox and Catholic Christians different governments. The court of the Caliph drew Egyptian Copts and Albanian Muslims, with powerful government positions carefully doled-out to those who sat atop various hierarchies representing ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. There were different streams for civil service and mercantile jobs based on region, language and religion. In the Levant, Orthodox Greeks were preferred for civil service posts, Sunni Arabs for mercantile monopolies and oligopolies, but the same did not hold true in Egypt or Albania. The Ottomans, more than any empire before or since, nailed the “politics of representation.”

Underpinning this was the principle of “personality of law,” the idea that the laws that applied to a person were not the derived from the polygon in which one was standing, etched onto the surface of the planet (the way the law works today) but rather from what sort of person one was, a Christian or a Muslim, a Turk or an Greek, a speaker of Arabic or Serbo-Croatian. This proved a highly effective means of social control. Because every group in the empire was “represented,” there was an elite to which every Ottoman could aspire, and there was an elite willing to defend the Ottoman state in order to safeguard its privileges, its representation.

Like so many things today, the “politics of representation” we see as “progressive” is actually a deeply conservative practice of social control practiced, to varying degrees, by successful empires going back to the Persia of Darius and Xerxes, where Jews were given special seats in the proto-Zoroastrian court.

Before resuming the history lesson, let me be clear about what the politics of representation is not; it is not affirmative action. Affirmative action programs are necessarily part of larger state-led efforts to make sure that all participants in the workforce are treated fairly and that all parts of the workforce are representative of the population as a whole. The politics of representation does the opposite. By creating token elites from every group, it seeks to quiet the voices of non-elites by co-opting them into identifying with “their” elites in their putative competition for influence with “other” elites. Will the next vizier be a Copt or a Greek? And when the former succeeds, this politics sells this as a victory for the million Coptic fellahin toiling in cotton fields throughout the Nile Delta. That is why affirmative action works against any job being viewed as the province or specialty of one particular religion, gender or ethnicity but instead tries to create the most representative, mixed group possible in all jobs at all levels.

What once was the politics of affirmative action in the 1970s has, just like the rest of America’s welfare state in the ensuing forty years, been slowly turned into its opposite, cosmetically similar and yet for opposing purposes, with opposite functions. The Third Wayers who remade the Democratic Party and its trade, welfare and criminal justice policies under the Clinton Administration were also key agents in the transformation of affirmative action from a legal practice focused on working people to a symbolic discourse focused on elites.

The vision of diversity espoused by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton is the modern politics of representation: a place for everyone and everyone in their place. In this politics, America’s first black president could preside over a net annual transfer of wealth from black America to white America, with black Americans poorer relative to whites and more segregated relative to whites than at any point in the preceding forty years. That is why America is hitting a forty-five year nadir in reproductive freedom following the first major party candidacy for the presidency by a woman and her victory in the popular vote. It is because when you conflate justice for groups with symbolic and elite representation of their elites, those groups don’t just fail to benefit. They lose.

The idea that the composition and conduct of a royal court determines what happens in the world below is a myth with long legs: Oberon and Titania’s court in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Arthur and Guinevere’s in the grail stories, the Jade Emperor’s in Chinese myth, etc. We love those old myths and have been seeking to shoe-horn them into reality since Procopius blamed Justinian and Theodora for the Darkening of the Sun. But it’s just sympathetic magic: a theory of cause and effect that seems aesthetically intuitive but is actually bullshit.

Many things can cause an elite to be demographically representative of the population it purports to represent; one is a successful program of affirmative action and economic equality. Whatever legitimate criticisms we make of Fidel Castro’s Cuba when it comes to democratic rights and freedom of speech, by 1991, Cuba’s Communist Party had come to reflect the population below it in terms of racial representation because this diversity arrived from below. Black Cubans achieved parity as hotel managers before they achieved it in the Party. But although this representation has been maintained at the party level, that representation was no safeguard of equity below. Two generations of Cuban leaders have had to sacrifice economic equality for success in the tourism economy and have exiled black Cubans to the back of shop after shop. In this way we can see that diversifying those in authority has no causal relationship to diversity or fairness below. But diversifying below almost always is expressed in diversity above.

Of course, the transparency, the hollowness, the cynicism of the Ottoman politics of representation wears people down and angers those who see that it does nothing materially for the lives of ordinary people. In the nineteenth century, a Turkish nationalist movement emerged in the Ottoman state, demanding that, as creators of the Empire, Turks- all Turks- should enjoy superior political and economic authority. The Turkish nationalists focused their sense of injustice on the minority groups that they believed enjoyed greater power and opportunity than ethnic Turks. Because every group in the Empire was headed by corrupt elites, examples of Arabs, Greeks, Copts and Albanians screwing good, honest Turkish people out of their birthright abounded. Of course, this new Turkish nationalism led to Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians and others seeking better deals outside the Empire, which in turn provoked the pogroms of the 1910s and 20s for which the term “genocide” was invented.

Today, America stands somewhere similar. Donald Trump’s agenda is that of the Turkish nationalists of the nineteenth century: to cleanse the elite of minorities and restore them to their proper place either at the bottom of society or outside of it altogether, behind walls or prison bars. The Democratic Party’s decision to respond with the politics of representation sealed its fate and caused it to lose in 2016. Whatever movement triumphs over Trumpism, it will not be the defenders of a corrupt and broken status quo, but one that offers a more compelling and inclusive idea of universality: one pulling a thread through Americans, as workers, as citizens.

Within the US Democratic Party, there is only one candidate who stands for that. And my American friends, you should back him. He is here to smash capitalism, not fix it. And that is what all Americans need. What keeps Hispanic communities from being raided and terrorized is not a Hispanic Secretary of Labour—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people safe from police violence and wrongful imprisonment is not a black Attorney-General—America had one under Obama. What keeps black people from being segregated into inferior housing is not a black Secretary of Housing—America has one right now under Donald Trump. What keeps women’s reproductive rights safe is not a female Secretary of Health—American had one under Obama. The only force capable of fighting racism, authoritarianism and misogyny is socialism—and not the elite espousal of socialism, but its socialist enactment, the mobilization of millions of people across differences of sexuality, race, religion and gender.

What matters and must matter is that Donald Trump is opposed by a politics of equity and equality, not the broken and corrupt neo-Ottomanism of a place for everyone and everyone in their place.

Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 4: The Politics of Privatizing Reputation

It has been a while since I have written about the public discourse around sexual and gender-based violence and abuse. That’s because most of the points I would have wished to make have been made by more prominent, respected, articulate people than me, which is good. The point of these series on my blog is to fill gaps in leftist public discourse, not to serve as a microcosm thereof. Naturally, then, it is disappointing to feel the need to write anything about this. It suggests if not a total absence, a considerable lacuna in leftist thought on a matter. In this case, the absence pertains to embarrassing comeback attempts, something that, as the Gary Coleman of BC politics, I feel I have a special affinity for and might, then, offer a clearer and more precise contribution to.

In September 2018, Jian Ghomeshi wrote an article for the New York Review of Books; true to form, it was narcissistic, self-congratulatory and deceptive. In it, Ghomeshi asked rhetorically asked how long he should continue to be punished for his acts by being excluded from the public square as a public intellectual and broadcaster, given that he had not been criminally convicted of the assaults of which he had been accused. This viewpoint was echoed by trolls disguised as newspaper columnists.

There was context for this. Fans of Louis CK, who had admitted to using his financial power over several women to get them to let him masturbate in front of them and had offered a tepid apology for the affair, substituting “admiration” for “financial power” in his statement. People wanted to know: just how long before we “let” Louis CK get back to his career as a celebrity stand-up comic.

As typically takes place when questions of gender-based abuse and violence find their way into the public square, people quickly adopted a wholly inappropriate metaphorical vocabulary: that of the criminal justice system. Somehow, not getting paid to be on stage, on the radio or on TV constitutes some form of punishment or “sentence” that badly-behaving male celebrities are serving out when their shows get canceled after they do something inappropriate. And when the sentence is completed, it follows that they get to go back to being paid millions of dollars to be on screen.

This optic is, of course, an insane one to apply to highly coveted jobs that very few people ever get to do. People have a right to move about freely; only through a grave transgression of the law are they temporarily stripped of that right. But nobody has the right to be on stage; nobody has the right to be popular; nobody has the right to have their own TV show. And, central to the Louis CK case, nobody has a right to force anyone to watch them.

And yet, this metaphor of the “life sentence” has been used repeatedly to talk about male celebrities who crossed an important ethical or legal line in their treatment of women. The same metaphor is used, the same kinds of questions are asked about Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and a host of others. And yet, when one considers Polanski and Allen, the framing seems even more absurd: Allen and Polanski continue to be famous directors in whose movies major Hollywood and European stars appear; they continue to receive flattering interviews and other media attention; they even continue receiving major international awards for their work.

What punishment, then, were they actually suffering? What, exactly, was being described as a “sentence”? The answer is this: a lot of people have kept thinking they are creeps and some of those people have stopped watching their movies. And, at the end of the day, what this is really about is that there is a shockingly large number of people who believe that not being thought-of as a creep is a right that all men enjoy, that can only be revoked temporarily and only under the most extreme circumstances.

The Incel movement shares with the mainstream of North American society the belief that men own other people’s thoughts about them, that when someone thinks “that guy’s greasy,” that thought does not belong to the person thinking it but rather to the person to whom it pertains. This is the most extraordinary breach of individual selfhood and the liberal theory of the base unit and yet, such a view epitomizes the changes in social contract we associate with late capitalism and has been, from the beginning, embedded in the project of capitalist modernity.

One of the most underestimated thinkers in adumbrating the roots of the modern capitalist state is Irene Silverblatt, a holocaust survivor writing in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Silverblatt argues that many of the seeds of an incipient capitalist modernity are to be found not in early modern Europe’s core but in its periphery, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is here that modern ideas of race-thinking first played out and here that modern understandings of bureaucracy – with the technocrat as transactor of knowledge – appeared at their most thoroughly elaborated.

The Spanish society that arrived in the New World was already accustomed to the highest levels of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Europe; it contained Basques, Catalans and many other ethnicities whose languages would eventually be subsumed within Castilian Spain. It contained Christians, Jews and Muslims who had been enmeshed in a seven-century religious war known as the Reconquista. Spaniards descended from Roman colonists, some from Carthaginians, some from Goths, some from Franks, Vandals, Berbers and Arabs. Medieval Spain had been a hierarchical place in which people were treated differently depending on honor or calidad; sometimes that honor was created by present-day behaviour, sometimes inherited from one’s macro-lineage group, one’s raza (the origin of the term and idea of race). Like the rest of Europe it was a world of knights, lords, kings, peasants, urban labourers and the beginnings of a bourgeoisie. Some of the labouring worked in high-status clean jobs like millers while others worked in “unclean” jobs like tanners (the clean-unclean distinction pervaded the whole civilized world and, in India, had resulted in the creation of the dalit or “untouchable” caste).

The society the Spanish discovered in the Andes was every bit as complex as their own, organized into macro-lineage groups called allyus, headed by a dead ancestor, the most powerful of whom were mummified and periodically consulted by the living allyu head. When the Spanish arrived they had to both dominate Andean culture and integrate it with their own, subordinate noble families and marry into them, perceive enough of Andean society to surveil and dominate it and yet radically simplify it legally, administratively and conceptually. Furthermore, the African slaves conquistadors brought with them had to have a place in this new world too.

One of the first consequences of this project was something known as a limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) certificate. This certificate acted upon one’s casta (caste). The Spanish crown had created six major castes in its New World colonies: Español (white), indio (indigenous), negro (black), mestizo (mixed white and indigenous), mulato (mixed white and black) and zambo (mixed indigenous and black). Anyone in possession of such a certificate was, according to the state, white, from a legal perspective, making one eligible for any political office, impossible to enslave (unlike negros) and subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (unlike indios). (More on this aspect of Spanish imperial society two posts from now.)

These certificates soon became a commodity in their own right. With the right amount of money, one could purchase such a certificate from a corrupt government official and make that money back within not too much time as one’s employment and entrepreneurial prospects expanded. And that is not just because of how such certificates acted in a formal, legal sense. Although Jews were not part of the North American caste system devised by the Spanish and their immigration was supposedly prohibited, it was understood that some had entered the territory as “Portuguese,” because the adjacent Portuguese Empire, which handled the slave trade for Spain, looked the other way when it came to Jews passing for non-Jews. A limpieza de sangre certificate did not merely attest to the European descent of a person—it attested to a lineage that had never been tainted by Jewish blood, Muslim conversion or work in an unclean industry.

And such certificates did not merely act on one’s fate when the law spelled-out caste-based privileges. They affected the credibility of one’s testimony in court and before the inquisition. They affected whether one was invited to a cabildo (the assembly of Spanish notables who constituted the city fathers of a self-governing town). They affected one’s marriage prospects and a host of other things to which they had no technical pertinence.

It is here, then, under the aegis of the Hapsburgs’ New World empire that we first see the large-scale and systematic modern commodification of reputation, the idea that one can, though good behaviour and good luck or though money, own the portion of others’ opinion that pertains to oneself.

But as with so many other things about the early modern world, what began in Spain came to be more fully elaborated in Britain. Whereas one can trace the spreading of false news or declarations likely to breach the peace as an offense against the state or society to the Age of the Antonines in second century Rome, the privatization of this offense in the form of defamation or libel came into being haltingly.

There does not appear to be any moment that the common law tradition from which English law descends did not recognize slanderous speech to be an injury. As I have suggested elsewhere, the Germanic wergild tradition of law, in which injuries to the person were quantified monetarily and justice meted out through financial compensation gave societies based on it a leg up in internalizing the logic of capitalism, having the foundation of a proto-capitalist legal system. But wergild quantified only one aspect of reputation: reputational depreciation. Changes in reputation that were positive or simply alterations in kind or type of status were outside the purview of the wergild system.

More importantly, the English legal system only compensated those whose reputations depreciated due to a falsehood being circulated about them. While the onus of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an accusation has moved back and forth between plaintiff and defendant throughout the history of libel and slander law, the veracity of an accusation has always had the capacity to vitiate the claim of compensation for lost reputation.

When the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi first became public, the representatives he engaged were not lawyers, rather, they were representatives of the public relations firm, Navigator, a company specializing in “crisis communications” as they pertain to people containing blood and organs, as opposed to the corporations for which the field was first developed. Under the slogan “Navigator: When You Can’t Afford to Lose,” the firm’s web site succinctly explains its purpose: “Corporations and individuals sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. We quickly pull together the right team to manage issues before they escalate into major crises. When disaster strikes, our clients depend on our custom-built communications plans to minimize reputational damage.” The site goes on to offer a do-it-yourself program under the header “Sign Up for our Crisis Preparation and Reputation Recovery Program with Ivey Business School.”

Ultimately, Ghomeshi was too undisciplined for Navigator to handle, but many prominent Canadians like Michael Bryant, the Ontario Attorney-General who killed a mentally ill indigenous cyclist with his car, have benefited significantly from the expansion of reputational management from correcting falsehood to preserve reputation to burnishing it for the same purpose. Across the border, we recently witnessed the sudden reappraisal of a group of Catholic School boys’ confrontation with an indigenous war veteran at a protest in Washington DC. Columnists and news organizations quickly issued mea culpas for their portrayal of the young men as boorish racists, following a recontextualization of some video footage by RunSwitch PR, a Navigator-like firm hired by some of the boys’ parents.

RunSwitch, which goes by the motto “to ensure the right people know the right thing,” was able to perform a kind of reputational alchemy for a hefty fee. Whereas libel law and the work of firms like Navigator has traditionally been used to safeguard a reputation with pre-existing value against depreciation, the alchemy performed by RunSwitch transformed a boy whose name we did not know, with a forgettable face into an Anglo American media star who, for the first time, was given a platform to espouse the conservative views he had gone to Washington to help advance. In this way, RunSwitch’s work did not work like an intervention by Navigator or a libel lawyer but instead like a limpieza de sagre certificate.

While the name of the boy’s school had been known, his name, Nick Sandmann, was not, until RunSwitch entered the fray. In this way, something more than the defensive action of a Navigator campaign was in evidence: one individual was transformed into a celebrity with a national reputation because fashioning this spokesperson was the most efficient way to defend his school and classmates. But within this instrumentalist reasoning is something deeper: Sandmann’s presumed right to be well-regarded, irrespective of evidence before the very eyes of those judging him.

This is what Ghomeshi’s defenders desire too: to nullify the words of the women who described his brutal acts, to substitute our prior opinion of him for one that we have come to using evidence and our God-given reason because our current opinions hurt “his” reputation. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what reputation is and what it is for. “Your” reputation does not and should not belong to you. It belongs to the people whom you encounter, people who are alone with you in elevators or alleys, people you split restaurant bills with, people in the passenger seat of your car. These people own your reputation because they build it; they maintain it; and they are the ones who need it. You see: the purpose of your reputation is to inform people of how to protect their safety when they interact with you. It was never yours, nor should it be.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Our Present Moment and the Pearl River Vision

In 2001, I decided to give progressive politics a try and for the next seventeen years, I subscribed to a utilitarian political project. By that, I mean that I stood behind organizations, electoral and non-electoral, that made sense in what is called the “hedonic calculus.” Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the authors of a particular theory of liberalism, argued that our choices should be based on choosing the course of action that causes the least harm and the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. So, I joined the NDP and worked to elect candidates who had a shot at winning with the policies that did the least harm and the most good.

In 2006, when Stephen Harper became Prime Minister, I joined the “cooperation movement” which argued in favour of a united front among New Democrats, Liberals and Greens to dislodge one of the few neoconservative regimes in the world. This movement made me an active member of LeadNow and an organizer for Nathan Cullen’s NDP leadership campaign to succeed Jack Layton. Even after I was barred by the party from running for it, I continued as an activist for the NDP and as part of a larger multi-partisan progressive movement for the better part of a decade.

But in 2018, this stopped working for me: the hedonic calculus of progressive politics failed. Back in the 1980s and 90s when I had rejected this calculus, I articulated its inherent problem: progressive politics articulates that which we can reasonably expect to be done, not what needs to be done. Every day that passes, the gap between these things widens. Now, in the second-biggest extinction event of the last four billion years, with human beings having killed half the life on the planet in my lifetime alone, what we can reasonably expect to be done is to kill the planet ten to fifteen years later than our current trajectory will kill it. It is little more than making sure that we pay ourselves $15/hour for murdering all creation rather than $11/hour.

But there is another reason I have abandoned progressive politics: as long as progressive politics constitutes the primary alternative to the new conservatism of accelerating global omnicide, that new conservatism will continue to make gains. Why? Because the politics of a Donald Trump, Doug Ford or Jason Kenney, which proposes to use an increasing portion of the state’s resources to burn fossil fuels faster and more needlessly, which proposes to actively attack knowledge, itself, is a more relatable politics than what progressives generally propose.

The new conservatism offers people two things progressives fail to: a sense of agency and a theory of blame. As I have stated before, voters do not and never have cast their votes in elections or joined citizens groups based on the pursuit of personal financial advantage. While people’s behaviour often resembles this to the untrained eye, movements that people generally support, electoral and otherwise, are movements that sell the most compelling theory of society’s moral order. Low-income conservative voters are not “voting against their interests” as constructed in theories of rational choice and financial advantage; they are voting for a moral order for society that makes the most sense and seems the most fair. People also look for heroes and villains in their stories and conservatism offers both—liberals, urban elites, atheists, trans people, gay and bisexual people, racialized people: they are to blame for our problems. People of faith, rich and poor, marching against sodomy and moral degeneration: they are the heroes.

The new conservatism also offers a compelling future state, one of unfettered financial and sexual freedom for financially solvent married men, close-knit communities bound by shared adherence to the local Abrahamic faith and the extirpation of society’s enemies, etc. This may be a bleak and unrealistic utopia but what, from the progressive side, is it up against?

The Pearl River Vision.

In the fall of 2018, I was asked to be a panelist at a day-long conference at the Surrey Guildford Sheraton, sponsored by Composite Public Affairs, the lobbying firm founded by former NDP cabinet minister Sue Hammell. The conference was worth every moment of my time because, prior to my panel, I got to watch something unfold that I realize I had never seen: the enthusiastic description of a Third Way future. Central to today’s progressive project is the defense of liberal and social democratic Third Way parties and yet, I realized, progressives actively try to avoid ever picturing the future that these parties imagine.

As I have written elsewhere, Third Way politics arose from social democratic parties redefining themselves to remain relevant in the post-Cold War world. With no external communist threat, the sole purpose of these parties is to enact policies that financial elites demand but that conventional free market parties are unable to deliver due to opposition by social movements and the general public. In this way, social democrats and liberals are permitted to enact some modest reforms in exchange for delivering on big ticket items that parties of the right could not deliver.

The John Horgan government in British Columbia has held true to this form by gaining buy-in and demobilizing opposition to three necessarily interlinked energy projects in Northern BC: the over-budget and disaster-prone Site C dam which violates Treaty Eight, created to power the next project, the largest carbon-emissions source in BC history, a Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) plant in Kitimat to be supplied by five hundred new fracked wells per year in the Peace Region, and a pipeline through Wet’suwet’en territory connecting these, that is currently disrupting trap lines and subject to civil disobedience. The previous neoliberal regime had been unable to push these through because of widespread public opposition to, among other things, the scale of the tax concessions Royal Dutch Shell, best-known for their stalwart support for South African apartheid and their genocide against the Ogoni people in Nigeria, had demanded. Horgan’s Third Way NDP regime was able to provide a billion dollars in subsidies and tax exemptions, including the carbon tax on emissions, and in addition to the existing $247 million annual subsidy to fracking operations in the Peace.

Uncharacteristically, because they were supposed to be speaking to an audience of lobbyists, fixers and corporate types, two of the panelists waxed enthusiastic about how this fit into a larger vision of British Columbia and, in particular, to Southwestern BC. They described how, with an LNG plant operating in Kitimat, it was just a matter of time before Squamish-Woodfibre LNG plant would come fruition, something naturally necessitating a massive fixed concrete link crossing Howe Sound, a ten-lane expressway connecting Squamish, Gibsons and West Vancouver. As their enthusiasm grew, this Third Way utopia began elaborating in what I might almost venture to call, as a scholar of religion, a collaborative theophany.

With Howe Sound paved, it would be only natural to have one or more even bigger expressways traversing the Salish Sea, making ferry traffic a thing of the past. Besides, they pointed out, the Salish Sea would be full of tankers from around the world, here for Alberta bitumen and BC natural gas. There was a model of this, one remarked: the Pearl River Delta in China, the megalopolis that has swallowed Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, among other cities, whose population now approaches sixty million people. This new metropolitan region would not just encompass Victoria, Nanaimo, Squamish and Gibsons; it would stretch east all the way to Hope and would comprise a population of at last ten million people, with enough transportation infrastructure to sustain not just rapid transit but private vehicles for anyone who could afford it and a robust ride-hailing culture providing round-the-clock service via Uber or Lyft.

What of the affordability crisis? Here, the panelists had some innovative thoughts, too. With more air travel in their Third Way utopia and, especially, more interurban helicopter travel, why should low-wage workers need to live in the megalopolis at all, especially those working with their hands? They spoke excitedly about how some BC construction firms were already showing the way, creating temporary company housing on construction sites, themselves. Such sites could function just like oil wells in the Peace, they reasoned. Workers could work two weeks on, two weeks off and spend their off-time with their friends and families in working class second-tier communities like Prince George, Kamloops or the city that pioneered so much of this, Fort MacMurray. This model, furthermore, could be expanded to anyone who worked with their hands. Were company barracks for baristas so far off, I wondered.

Because the Third Way offers only mitigation efforts, as opposed to a vision actually countering global trends of wealth concentration, proletarianization and environmental degredation, the question for progressives is not whether their politics will reach this destination but when.

While it is true that the new conservative future resembles that of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, the reality is that the progressive future is also one described in twentieth century dystopian fiction. William Gibson imagined “the Sprawl” a gigantic Atlantic Coast North American strip city from Boston to Atlanta. And the image that haunted me as I closed my eyes and tried to process what the panelists were saying came from the opening scenes of Blade Runner, a sweltering, grimy megalopolis, surrounded by a lifeless sea, battered by typhoons. I could even imagine arguing with my fellow Vancouverites in the decades to come about whether the city had always had levees and whether we had always had a typhoon season. That’s because, as Charlie Smith and others have suggested, there is a special kind of progressive climate nihilism, a mouthing of environmental platitudes nobody believes as the ribbon is cut on another highway expansion or petroleum development.

The primary difference between progressive politics and conservative politics is not, then, whether to embrace the extinction event but whether to pair that embrace with loud and cruel enthusiasm and brazen anti-science lies or whether to pair that embrace with a false sobriety, concern, mutterings about “pragmatism” and “balance,” and some carefully measured and well-timed crocodile tears. Ultimately, if one is leaning into a blizzard of death and destruction, it should surprise no one that the former is a more emotionally authentic, less cognitively dissonant experience and, hence, a more compelling one.

A left vision, one of heroism, shared sacrifice and, in the words of Tolkien “victory unlooked-for and sorrow long-foreseen” must move to the forefront. As Brian Fawcett reminds us, a life-affirming social movement must be able to remember its past and imagine a future. Imagining a possible future will require profound grieving and the confrontation of hard truths but these are necessary experiences to move past the covertly nihilistic and empty politics of progressivism.

BC Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Secret History of the Failed NDP-Green Alliance of the 90s (part 2)

Stuartparker.ca is going weekly and making other changes for 2019. As a gesture of good faith, we are returning to all of our suspended/abandoned article series and updating them.

People make deals out of desperation. That is just how it is. In 1999, my leadership of the BC Green Party was every bit as imperiled as Glen Clark’s leadership of the NDP but for different reasons. That’s what I was talking about in part one, when I said we were running out of time.

Despite their full-throated support of the first-past-the-post system today, conservative British Columbians were deeply disillusioned with the system in the second half of the 1990s and casting about for alternatives. This was because parties to the right of the NDP had won 58% of the popular vote in the 1996 election but the NDP had won 52% of the seats with just 39%. Not only that, the main centre-right party, the BC Liberals had, by itself, bested the NDP by 3%, producing a classic first-past-the-post “wrong winner” election in which the BC Liberals won the popular vote 42% to 39% but lost the seat count thirty-three seats to thirty-nine.

Consequently, much of the province’s corporate and media elite had never really accepted Glen Clark’s NDP as the legitimate government as they had the Harcourt government that preceded it. But despite this, most of the NDP base remained secure at an organizational level. The province’s trade union movement, environmental movement and feminist movement remained firmly in the NDP camp. Only anti-poverty organizations in Vancouver and on the Island moved away from the big orange tent during this period and this was largely because the NDP had made BC’s underclass the target of public scorn and brutal fiscal austerity between 1993 and 1995. But the same was not true of public opinion. While every major environmental group continued to stand with the premier, even after he called them “enemies of British Columbia,” environmentally and socially concerned voters were drifting away in record numbers, irrespective of what movement leaders had to say.

The Clark government, for its part, had a constrained ability to deliver for its base. The government was under constant attack in the press and faced ongoing legal harassment, that it later turned out was facilitated by Clark’s own Attorney-General, Ujjal Dosanjh. It also concurrently faced a capital strike by the mining sector, a concurrent European boycott campaigns, one by Greenpeace, the other by the BC Chamber of Mines and a major downturn in the Japanese and South Korean economies, the most reliable consumers of BC coal.

Consequently, the Clark government focused their efforts in three main areas: reinvigorating the economy of the Northeast with increased natural gas and petroleum exploration and extraction, reinvigorating the private sector trade union movement through the introduction of sectoral bargaining in the construction sector and the “fast ferries” project, an import substitution industrialization (ISI) scheme to spur creation of an aluminum-hulled ship-building sector. The first endeavour was an unqualified success; the second was abandoned before completion; the third was the focus of much of the ire of BC’s establishment against the government.

The BC Green Party faced diametrically opposite circumstances. Between 1996 and 2000, the party rose in public opinion polls from 2% to 11% of the popular vote. Our byelection performances, were generally positive; we won a number of polls in the Surrey-White Rock byelection, where we were noticed by the Legislative Press Gallery and, thereafter, began to appear in Mike Smyth, Les Leyne and Vaughn Palmer columns. We won Lasqueti Island in the otherwise-disastrous Parksville byelection of 1998 and we placed third, ahead, of the NDP in the Delta-South byelection of 2000.

We also gained prominence as co-founders and spokespeople for the Electoral Change Coalition (ECCO), a broad alliance of groups campaigning for proportional representation, led by Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

But while we posted modest increases in our annual party budget and membership, the reality was that the BC Greens were basically a $80,000 per year, 1000-member organization and remained so throughout this period. That was a sight better than the 100-member, $25,000 per year organization whose leadership I won in 1993 but the absence of commensurate growth in membership or donations to match our poll standing and gains in media credibility was concerning.

Much of our popularity rested on a handful of extraordinarily talented and hard-working individuals. Julian West, an MIT Applied Mathematics PhD, was, likely, the second- or third-best political strategist in BC at the time and he was giving us twenty hours per week for free. It was he who had cunningly persuaded the original Angus Reid polling form to begin prompting voters with our name because he demonstrated that failing to prompt was producing underpolling. In this way, our sudden poll breakout, from which gains in popularity and media coverage cascaded, was likely as statistically erroneous as the 0% we had previously been polling. West was also the author of ECCO, following his brilliant display of erudition and humour to Lanigan at an otherwise nightmarishly boring Social Credit convention. The Coalition’s founding president, Sonja Sanguinetti, the president of the BC Liberal Party at the time, also lent an unwarranted credibility to the enterprise given that my closest advisor, folk singer Geoff Berner, and I had been her eldest son’s closest friends in elementary school.

Furthermore, incredible as it might be to present-day readers, the ECCO, while getting us plenty of media coverage and respect from people on the right actually tainted the Greens. First, the founder of BC’s proportional representation movement was former Social Credit MLA Nick Loenen, a Dutch reformed conservative former seat-mate of premier Bill Vander Zalm, whose book on PR suggests that it is the best way to successfully de-fund abortion in Canada. With support from no left-wing organizations except Western Canada Wilderness Committee and the David Suzuki Foundation, ECCO, which included anti-abortion activists Kathleen Toth and Heather Stillwell, the leaders of the BC Family Coalition Party and the Christian Heritage Party of Canada, respectively, looked to many on the left like a right-wing group, its president being Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation.

“Proportional representation is just a scheme to ensure a permanent right-wing majority in Victoria,” was the feeling of most on BC’s left at the time. ECCO, in this way, marked the Greens as a dangerous, alien force, fake leftists making common cause with the right.

At the same time, this period also featured a hardening of opposition to the Greens by environmental organizations. During the 1996 election, I had worked with the Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith and Western Canada Wilderness Committee’s Adriane Carr to expose a corrupt election funding shell game that was helping the NDP win environmentalists’ votes.

BC’s largest, blue chip environmental organizations, like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and World Wildlife Fund, had, during the NDP’s first term, become part of a consortium called BC Wild, an entity formed at the behest of the Pew Charitable Trust, the charitable arm of Sunoco, the Sun Oil Company of Pennsylvania. In early 1996, in the run-up to the election, BC Wild members had been approached by individuals close to the heart of the BC government to create another consortium, this one called British Columbians for a Better Environment (BCBE).

BCBE, which purported to speak for all BC environmentalists, ran a campaign specifically focused on driving down the Green Party vote in the election, using the slogan “Don’t make your vote a toxic political waste.” Because of limits on third-party election spending and on election spending by charities, complex financing arrangements had to be made, with certain coalition members paying for different parts of the campaign. The necessary transparency of the financing permitted Smith to correlate each organization’s BCBE spending with its receipt of recent, unexpected and, in some cases, unsolicited provincial government grants for either almost exactly the same amount of money. According to Smith’s accounting, BCBE was being funded not by Sunoco, not by its member organizations but by the BC Ministry of Environment.

Already disconnected from and unpopular with all of the province’s environmental groups, except for Wilderness Committee, Smith’s media coverage further soured relations and, by 1997, had cemented not just a frosty but an adversarial relationship between the Greens and the environmental movement’s leadership.

By 1998, the BC NDP and Greens were mirror images of one another: one was a party hated by the province’s elites and an ever-increasing number of voters but fairly secure in its party-base relations. The Greens, on the other hand, were a party whose popularity was rapidly growing but which not only lacked a base but, at the social movement level, was surrounded by enemies.

Beginning in 1997, there was a permanent campaign to remove me as party leader, initially based within the party but, as we entered 1999, one that began to find allies outside the party, in the environmental movement. The campaign was largely based on what I term “on side for the big win” thinking. As we have seen with Greg Clarke’s Alberta Party and as we saw with Preston Manning’s United Alternative Project, the question people often ask when joining a movement rapidly ascending in popularity, “why aren’t we growing faster!?” “why aren’t we the government already!?” “why are we targeting specific ridings when we’re about to win every single one!?”

This kind of thinking, in which signs of ongoing marginality are reinterpreted as signs of imminent, total victory, tends to be most common in apocalyptic movements. Although Greens ground their apocalypticism in scientific terms and appear, as far as anyone can tell, to be empirically correct about the imminent collapse of planetary life support systems, this does not make them sociologically immune to the properties we might associate with doomsday cults. Until 1997, the party had terrible membership retention, with members rotating out in an average of eighteen months, just like your typical doomsday cult. Despite the scientific basis of the Green eschaton, members were typically anti-science and skeptical of the Enlightenment legacy. Consequently, the party had little institutional memory and often repeated mistakes ad nauseam.

There had also developed an unhealthy cult of personality around my leadership in my first term, not among my close associates but in other parts of the party’s active memberships. In this way, people often did not understand the party to be a democracy and did not understand that it was their duty to debate and dissent. The Greens had long opposed (1985-1993) the idea of having a leader because they saw the office in a cartoonish, authoritarian, unrelated to the practice of Canadian politics at the time. This was a sense the party culture retained after deciding to establish the office after all. To be the dictator of the party, a person must be trustworthy and intellectually superhuman; otherwise the party understood itself to have submitted to tyranny.

So, my closest allies and I decided that, to grow, the party must change its internal culture so as to become appealing to mainstream, democratic-spirited leftists. And so we embarked on aggressive program of cultural change, changing meeting venues and voting practices. We initiated a comprehensive policy reform that was heralded by Berner’s report Polishing the Turd, which began by offering an unqualified disparagement of the party’s pre-1995 policies.

This campaign of relentless cultural change, in an effort to point the party away from the hippie subculture and create a more democratic decision-making process was about as well-advised as the provincial government’s ISI program. It was a red rag to a bull that had been looking for an excuse to charge.

While the BC NDP saw the provincial constabulary, a growing capital strike and a media consensus closing in on it, in the tiny world of Green politics in 1999, things looked just as dire. Most in the party’s base who had elected us to internal office in the Greens had withdrawn or turned against us over our ambitious program of cultural change. We were surrounded by hostile feminist and environmental NGOs and a hostile labour movement. Furthermore, beginning with Colleen McCrory of the Valhalla Wilderness Society, some major environmental leaders had joined the Greens with the sole stated objective of removing from its leadership.

This is what set the table for a flurry of desperate agreements that would yield the first people in Canadian history being elected to office with “Green Party” beside their name before the end of 1999. More about the actual agreements and attempted agreements in the next installment.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 3: Galloway, Khomeinism and Saul’s Christian “Body:” the Anti-liberal Theory of the Base Unit

Stuartparker.ca is changing and going weekly in 2019. Check back for details in the coming days.

Of the perplexing figures of the past twenty years in politics George Galloway ranks highly. A British Labour MP originally admired by the international left for his hard line opposition to Britain’s entry into the Second Gulf War in 2003, Galloway has drifted further and further from recognizable left politics over the past decade and a half. This drift began with his creation of the Respect Party in 2004, a coalition of Muslim religious conservatives and socialists, loosely affiliated with the emerging Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, a situational alliance of leftist and Islamist petro-states seeking to end the petro-dollar system of US hegemony over global oil markets.

But whereas the Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, led by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was an alliance based on mutual material interests and a shared enemy, the Respect Party was about more than this. Its ideology constituted a genuine fusion of key elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism and the theocratic ideologies of the Iranian state and its international paramilitary wing, the Hezbollah.

The Gallowayism propounded by the Respect Party sought to represent both the British left and a wide spectrum of ideological tendencies within Muslim diasporic communities in the UK. The party stood for greater community control of schools and education by diasporic communities, greater efforts to address racism and Islamophobia in the private and public spheres, a reduction in immigration restrictions between Britain and the Muslim world, an end of British alignment with US foreign policy, withdrawal from the European Union, reversal of tax and benefit reductions since the 1980s and the return of occupying forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway framed the British state as being “at war” with Islam and Muslims generally and sought to bring about an end to that war. In the predominantly Muslim constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway re-entered parliament now representing Respect.

Ultimately, Respect fractured into two parties with most non-Muslim members moving to the Socialist Workers Party in 2007; this appears to have been related to their dispute with a key non-profit organization that functioned as Galloway’s main campaign surrogate in 2005, the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organization seeking not just the substantial self-government rights for Muslims in public education but a more general personality of law principle for diasporic communities. IFE believes in a legal system like that of present-day India in which Muslims are governed under a separate legal code from the majority religious population. This Muslim code would include a radical reformulation of family law allotting substantial powers to husbands and fathers over their female family members. Without the substantial left and anti-war movement support, Galloway was defeated in the 2010 election.

Galloway re-entered parliament in 2012 with the assistance of another conservative Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (UK). In the byelection Galloway contested, the MPACUK focused its third party campaign on accusations of apostasy against the Labour candidate whom they argued was not, as he claimed, a practicing Muslim.

In 2012, Galloway joined many “anti-imperialists” in defending Wikileaks’ Julian Assange but did so in a highly distinctive way: he suggested that even if the testimony accusing Assange of rape were to be believed, Assange’s behaviour did not constitute anything worse than “bad manners.”

In 2015, Galloway attempted to return to parliament, this time opposing a Muslim Afghan candidate, Naz Shah, who had gained substantial prominence for her feminist activism following her harrowing and violently abusive experience as a child bride, married without her consent. Strangely, Galloway made this his central campaign issue, arguing that Shah was both dishonest and morally corrupt because she had claimed she was contracted into marriage against her will at the age of fifteen when, in fact, Galloway argued, she had been forced to marry at sixteen and a half, something to which he deemed it wrong for her to object. He attempted to demonstrate this with what he claimed was her marriage contract, which his representatives had obtained in Pakistan.

It may seem at this point in my post that I am simply telling you the story of a reprehensibly sexist man who is also a socialist. But while I think Galloway’s misogyny is indisputable, I want to suggest that something else is also going on, something pertinent to our understanding of the contested and unstable nature of the modern self.

The Respect Party, like many of the neo-traditionalist authoritarian parties that are rising around the world today, was actually saying something large and revolutionary, albeit extremely disturbing. What Gallowayism contested was the liberal theory of the base unit. The liberal junk anthropology that I took down in my last post has served an important, albeit ahistorical purpose: to argue that the fundamental base unit of society is the individual person.

This used to be the thing over which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatives saw as the essential heresy of liberalism: the idea that the organic base unit of society was the solitary, atomized person. As anthropology suggests, this is a notion that is arbitrary at best and absurd at worst. And that is why most societies have understood some sort of larger unit as their base unit. Whereas a liberal sees a family as a collection of individuals, people outside this ideology see an individual as a fraction of a family.

For the Inca, the base unit was the allyu, the macro-lineage that could be traced to one great ancestor; for much of Indian history, the jati, a guild-like macro-lineage structure was the base unit, the extended family a sub-unit thereof and the individual, a fraction of that; raza, in medieval, as opposed to early modern, Spain, (the cognate of “race”) used to refer to macro-lineages that could be traced to a single ancestral conversion (or moment of saintly patronage), to an Abrahamic religion. The raza, the allyu, the jati are just a few historical examples.

When Saul of Tarsus writes to his followers in Corinth, he is arguing that his intentional communities of like-minded believers, and not the individual, constituted the base unit, that the ways in which some had conceived of salvation as personal was wrong.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Just as we often fail to realize that what we think is a public policy debate is actually an epistemological debate, we often fail to realize that what we see as a debate about the relative rights of different kinds of individuals are actually debates about our social base unit.

At equal proximity to the ideological core of the modern Republican Party to the episteme of Authenticity is the theory of the nuclear family as base unit. Expressed religiously in the “headship principle” where prayers must be undertaken and led by the family’s head (the father), the fundamental argument of the GOP is that women’s bodies are fractions of a coherent familial body that have no essential independent ontology. The only way they can be severed from the body of the family is through marriage into another male-headed collective body.

Such a family has sweeping reproductive rights; it is just that the rights are articulated by the executive as opposed to reproductive part of the familial body. If one looks at the structure of abortion laws enacted to prohibit abortions and criminalize miscarriages, the ability to punish women for ending pregnancies is contingent upon the participation of the biological father. While getting a mid-term abortion may be technically illegal in many states, the only way the offense becomes prosecutable or actionable is if the male participant make a police report or files suit.

And we see similar approaches to women’s bodies in similar conservative social movements. Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party legalized marital assault and rape in 2017. Narendra Modi’s BJP and Recep Erdogan’s movements, similarly, do not so much view women as inferior members of society as inferior parts of a cohesive social body, that of the extended, male-headed family.

Gallowayism merits our study because it is the first of these neo-traditionalist ideologies to rear its head on the political left. One can effectively reduce Galloway’s political argument to a single unifying point: white, Christian men get to manage “their” women as they see fit; brown, Muslim men do not. There will be no fundamental equality all men enjoy an equal right to manage the bodies and minds of “their” familial or extended familial body. This is, fundamentally, the foundation of Iranian law, since the 1979 Khomeinist revolution and it came to be a sincere part of Galloway’s anti-capitalist worldview.

Gallowayism forces the left to once again confront the way in which its long-term alliance with liberalism has caused us to atrophy intellectually, to quit the field in one of the most central debates of our times. The choice between patriarchal neotraditionalism and the late capitalist theory of the independent, individual choice-maker is no choice at all. We need to rediscover elements of Second Wave feminist thinking and pre-Stalinist Marxist thinking about our own theory of the base unit.

Instead, I fear that the left is choosing to amplify the liberal characteristics of self-making in order to distinguish itself, to find ways to offer more atomized and solipsistic ideas of constructing a modern self. More on that in my next post on this subject.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Race | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 2: The Junk Science of Liberalism

The term “junk science” has gained unprecedented currency in recent years as flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate denialists and young earth creationists march triumphantly into mainstream discourse. The so-called science that states autism is a parasite and can be driven out by force-feeding bleach to your kids or that which states fossils can be formed on the surface of the ground in less than a decade is distinct from merely false claims or false conclusions. It is a body of pseudo-knowledge with its own journals, experiments, training, museums and twisted logics. In this way, it bears some resemblance to abandoned and rejected scientific theories of the past, like Galenic humoral medicine with its prescribed bleedings.

One of the reasons that liberals and progressives who wish to accelerate climate change typically embrace climate nihilism over denialism is their discomfort with junk science. Despite its battered state, liberalism’s allegiance to actual science has actually increased in recent years as liberals and progressives have backed away from the more vulgar representations of the postmodern critique, now that it is being used by characters like Rick Santorum to deny climate change.

For this reason, it is generally but mistakenly thought that progressives do not embrace junk science but this is an error. Progressives, and liberals generally, do embrace junk science, just not in the hard sciences. The liberal commitment to anthropological and sociological junk science is every bit as deep as that of those outside the collapsing liberal consensus. There are many reasons for this but the first and by far the most important is that liberalism is necessarily premised on junk science.

The foundation of liberalism is social contract theory, a theory explicitly based on the best cutting-edge anthropology of pre-literate human civilizations seventeenth century Europe could produce. Social contract theory was developed by Thomas Hobbes as part of a multi-part internally consistent argument advanced in Leviathan. The foundation of this argument, as declared by Hobbes himself, was a theory about what early humans were like and how the first human societies emerged. Because there was not yet a theory of evolution, a discipline of primatology or such thing as anthropological fieldwork, no one can fault Hobbes for his methods or the theory he generated using them. Here is what Hobbes thought primitive humans were like.

Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Hobbes believed that human beings’ original and natural state was a pre-social “state of nature” upon which blank slate society had to be constructed.

John Locke, who further elaborated liberalism offered his own theory of human beings’ natural state, on which his social contract theory was also premised, offers a sunnier vision of human beings’ natural state:

O understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.

            Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the third father of social contract theory offers yet a more optimistic and sunny vision of the natural human state:

The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.

This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master. The family then may be called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.

            In this way, we see that liberalism is premised on a set of non-identical but equally scientifically false descriptions of the origins of society, descriptions that are unanimous in these crucial errors:

  1. that human beings begin in a pre-social state, that social bonds among humans began only after we became human beings and only after such faculties as speech and tool-making developed;
  2. that there exists no natural centripetal attraction among human beings, that we have no natural desire to be in accord or compliance with the other human beings around us and will only seek to group-up when it is rational and profitable to do so; and

  3. that private property existed prior to any social order recognizing it.

Today, the human sciences tell us that this is all hogwash, that Aristotle, 2400 years ago, had a better sense of pre-literate societies than the founders of liberalism did. And since the last of these texts was published in 1762, no major discovery in the human sciences has produced the slightest revision in liberal ideology, even though the past 256 years have yielded enormous advances in understandings of how human beings form societies in both the past and present.

Like biblical literalists who happily accept the material gains produced by the Darwin-Mendel synthesis even though it requires a recognition of evolutionary genetics, liberals are perfectly happy to recognize discoveries in anthropology, primatology, sociology, psychology, neurology and psychiatry, just as long as those discoveries are understood to exist in a separate domain of human truth that does not impinge on the theories of truth.

A similar situation existed in the Middle Ages when it came to astronomy. It was “known” that the sun, moon, each planet and the “plane of fixed stars” were each contained in a crystalline sphere made of an indestructible, transparent substance known as the Quintessence and that each body could only move in circular motions. But it was obvious, long before Copernicus offered a heliocentric universe, that this did not account for the movements people saw in the heavens. So, universities split astronomy into two disciplines: Physical Astronomy, which contained the crystalline spheres and Mathematical Astronomy, which made accurate calculations of astronomical events. While Mathematical Astronomy was used day-to-day, it was not considered “true.” That was the sole domain of Physical Astronomy.

In the same way, when it comes to making academic inquiries into how human beings make choices, behave in groups, agree to do things, construct their priorities or try to hold onto inanimate objects, liberals are happy to concede the predictive power of the human sciences. Unless these things impinge on law, politics or economics; these domains must be understood only using debunked seventeenth and eighteenth-century junk science.

Worse yet, like the discipline of Physical Astronomy, liberal social junk science has continued to function as a parallel line of intellectual inquiry walled-off from the mainstream of the human sciences. In this vein, we see a particularly hamfisted and uncritical reading of the largely discredited work of psychologist Abraham Maslow taught in nearly every business school, decades after its marginalization within the field of psychology.

Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” presumes that people will/should meet their material needs before meeting any social needs. First, individuals must sort out their food, housing, clothes and a steady stream of income before they can/should get involved in making art, socializing, having fun, etc. This, of course, presumes that human beings were born into industrial consumer societies with low unemployment rates and high demand for non-coerced labour. The reality, whether one is living in a primitive hominid group or in a modern city based on the “gig economy,” one’s best guarantee of safety is a social network that can work together to stay employed, housed, fed and clothed. While this has been recognized in peer reviewed anthropology for a half a century, in the fields of knowledge that determine the actions of the state, this information cannot depose the junk science of liberalism.

How is this junk science held in place, then? It is held in place through an intellectual sleight of hand older than liberalism, itself, one we find just as evident in Aristotelian theories of law, politics and economy. Note that in the paragraph above my use of “will/should” and “can/should”—this is the main way junk social science functions. It offers models that are supposed to be concurrently a description of how the world operates and how it should operate; consequently, whenever these models fail to predict or explain events, it is not because of a flaw in the model but instead because of a flaw in reality.

You know this routine: every time there is an election in which voters do not vote based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which they “vote against their economic interests,” by which commentators mean that they do not choose the party/platform that gives them the most materially the most affordably, it is the fault of the voters, not the model of personal advantage maximization that has once against failed to predict events. In this way, junk science that fails to predict or explain events, again and again, is excused by what social scientists call “blaming the world.”

In fact what has happened is typically wholly explicable through normal social science. But this explanation cannot function as the primary explanation in our discourse because if it did, we might question not just the premising of electoral politics on falsehoods but the premising of our economic and legal relations on it too, perhaps questioning the justice and reasonableness of such things as contracts, consent and consumer choice.

More disquieting yet, it might bring into question the bedrock on which all of these things rest: the Hobbesian falsehood of the autonomous, aware, pre-social self.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 1: Introduction: Why I Am Not a Progressive or Whose Cock Do I Have to Suck to Run for the NDP?

Last fall, I met former BC NDP MLA Harry Lali for the first time. My friend and campaign manager Tom Ewasiuk introduced us. I didn’t think I would get along with Harry but, whatever our differences, we were men who had been around BC politics too long and both felt like ambassadors from another time.

Our interactions soon became shaped by one of the weirder anecdotes of the NDP’s successful 2017 election campaign. The riding of Columbia River-Revelstoke was one of the handful of seats the NDP had retained in the BC interior, due to high levels of precipitation (until 2013, NDP voting in the rural mainland of BC, outside of Harry’s riding, strongly correlated to annual precipitation levels and overcast days) but it was in play because of the party’s poor fortunes in the rural mainland generally and because the popular incumbent was stepping down. Because a white man was resigning his seat, new party rules made it an “equity mandate” riding, one in which only a person who was either not male, not straight, not able-bodied and/or not white could seek the party’s nomination.

Parenthetically, it is interesting to note that while the BC NDP recognizes gender, race and sexuality as sites of discrimination it does not recognize class. Or rather it does, but in the opposite way. It prohibits poor people from seeking party nominations by slapping on a punitive $5000 vetting fee because, as the party president explained to me, people who can’t easily get hold of $5000 are not serious people.

In any case, the only candidate eligible and willing to seek the nomination was a disabled woman who was unpopular with party members so, at the last minute, a person who appeared to be a straight white man was suddenly vetted as an equity mandate candidate. But the party would not disclose to the media what minority identity he represented. Harry’s and my mind went to the same place: the guy had been induced to claim he slept with other men. Where Harry and I differed was on whether the candidate, whom I rather liked, would have felt duty-bound to engage in some same-sex activity so as to engage “honestly” with the process. My feeling was that if this guy was willing to make the sacrifices he had already lined up for to help the party, what was a little fellatio? Harry disagreed.

The voters were unimpressed and the NDP lost Columbia River-Revelstoke, in part, no doubt because voters were split, as Harry and I were, on the ethical way to approach identity politics in our age.

There is a lot to unpack in this story and I will return to it a few times but now, I’m stepping way back and enlarging the optic because this is the first part of a series I really hope to do a better job of completing than my other article series because I feel that I have no collected my thoughts well enough to make a significant intellectual intervention on the subject of identity.

Liberalism and Progressivism

Liberalism, the philosophical description of the system of relationships that undergird capitalism, has, until recently, enjoyed long-term intellectual hegemony in the most powerful empires that have shaped global history. With few exceptions, most philosophical and political debates in a society like Canada’s have been among different schools of liberal thought. Since the mid nineteenth century, our major debates have been about what kind of liberal society to be, what kind of liberal economy to have, what theory of liberalism will win the day.

Today, neo-Keynesians debate monetarists; progressives debate libertarians; it is only at the edges of these debates that we see other horizons of possibility, and those are not pretty. It now appears that the American religious right, while retaining certain elements of the liberal worldview is now sufficiently divergent in some key areas like epistemology that we can see the emergence of alternatives outside the liberal consensus that has shaped our thought for the past two centuries.

But it is precisely because the challenges to liberal hegemony have moved, since 1991, from the political left to the political right, those of us on the left find ourselves under unprecedented pressure to defend the liberal legacy and, indeed, to become part of a permanent locked alliance between leftists and liberals. The name for this alliance is, of course, “progressive.” To be progressive is to identify with a twofold political project:

  1. to slow the dismantling of the Cold War welfare state and to ensure that new forms of state intervention to ameliorate social problems are piecemeal, non-universal and reliant on partnerships with private corporations and the non-profit sector for delivery. The Affordable Care Act and the post-2015 BC, Ontario and Alberta provincial childcare programs exemplify progressive programs.
  2. to accelerate and intensify a politics of minority non-economic rights and high-level representation, enforced through piecemeal high-level affirmative action like cabinet, corporate board membership and candidate nomination de facto quotas so that various disadvantaged identity groups can experience “representation” and through changes to social etiquette. Most etiquette changes, like labeling gender-neutral restrooms, prohibiting offensive Hallowe’en costumes, etc. are enforced simply through social pressure and offense politics but a growing number are mandated either by statute or through the pursuit of civil and criminal prosecutions for hate speech and exclusionary behaviour.

The progressive project, then, typically entails increasingly “representative” elites presiding over a system that typically further economically impoverishes and politically marginalizes patronized groups, while, at the same time, building and reinforcing systems of patronage that allow people to benefit from non-material ideas of representation. Black Americans strongly identified with the successes of Barack Obama as US president even though a consequence of this was an increase in white resentment and anti-black racism and the further impoverishment of black relative to white America due to Obama’s lack of political capital needed to defend black gains that slipped away under his watch.

This political formula transcends the liberal order and was probably practiced best not by the US Democratic Party but the Ottoman Empire which created a complex system of self-government known as the milet system that saw every major religious identity group in the empire represented at the elite level and offered some degree of self-government, even if that was inextricable from the legal and economic inferiority non-Muslims on which it depended.

Because of the monstrosity of the forces that have emerged to challenge the progressive project, many on the left, I among them, have often been frightened back into the progressive alliance and find ourselves defending various aspects of liberalism because of our fear of the rising tide of the extreme right or our desire to preserve some cherished aspect of the twentieth-century welfare state.

I am making my second effort at a significant intellectual intervention (since I wrote Age of Authenticity in 2012) because I believe that the time for this politics is behind us. The progressive movement will collapse—and soon. Furthermore, progressive movements’ tolerance for climate nihilism means that continuing to support the broad progressive project will simply serve to alter which political movements preside over frying the planet.

In my last major intervention, I feel as though I wrote something that, while not especially enjoyable to read, had significant descriptive and predictive power in observing the rise of Trump and an understanding of the social forces that created and maintain his movement. This intervention will not be an epistemological one but instead one about identity, and, in particular, the fraught and much abused term “identity politics.” More broadly, it will examine the link between identity that the theory of the self, just as Age of Authenticity examined the relationship between epistemology and the theory of the self.

Early in the Marxist corpus, there was significant interest in the nature of the self and an understanding that, central to the capitalist project, was the creation of a certain kind of self, and atomized, isolated self, defined by its desires and aspirations. If we are to survive, we must create new-non-capitalist selves and that will mean addressing head-on the politics and phenomenology of identity. This means asking simple but very serious questions like “Am I what I do or am I what I like?” “Do I decide if I am white or do other people?” “What, if any, aspects of identity are biologically determined?” “Is there a difference between an identity one aspires to have and the identity one does have?”

Stay tuned for part two.

BC Politics Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Resignation from the BC NDP

 

Saturday, March 24th, 2018

BC New Democratic Party

#301 – 4180 Lougheed Highway

Burnaby, BC

V5C 6A7

Dear Sirs and Mesdames:

Please receive this as my official resignation as a member of the New Democratic Party, its provincial council and its Surrey-Green Timbers riding executive after seventeen consecutive years and a total of twenty years as a party member. I have served on constituency executives in Surrey, Burnaby, Vancouver and Toronto. I provided your party with a crucial endorsement that altered the campaign narrative during the 2001 election; I served as a paid consultant in 2002-03; I have recruited dozens of party members over the years; I have been attending conventions as a delegate from Forum 2000 with Ed Broadbent in 1985 to the 2017 Victoria convention; and, most recently, provided substantial assistance to the Surrey-Guildford GoTV operation that saw Garry Begg defeat Peter Fassbender.

I did all of these things based on the belief that the BC NDP had learned something from its near-annihilation in the 2001 election, that it would not return to office and repeat the mistakes of the 1990s. Clearly, such a belief was utterly unfounded. Rather, it seems that the brain trust that led the party to within a hair’s breadth of total destruction is back in the driver’s seat with a goal of re-enacting a style of governing even less appropriate for today’s BC than it was a generation ago.

It is not the 1990s anymore. The world has lost its appetite for centrist triangulation, Blairism and the Third Way. Nobody is looking for a BC NDP government to strike a course on minimum wage that places it to the right of Andrew Cuomo’s New York Democratic Party. Nobody is looking for a BC NDP to show it is serious by maintaining outlandish private school subsidies, subsidizing the oil industry through the LNG scam or completing WAC Bennett’s Two Rivers policy vision. One can no longer even make the case for the Third Way based on pragmatism.

I am forced, therefore, to reach one inescapable conclusion following Thursday’s $6 billion LNG subsidy announcement: the BC NDP believes that subsidizing transnational oil companies to increase fossil fuel exports is the right thing to do, that, in the eyes of today’s NDP, the global investor class who own and run companies like Petronas are more deserving of a break on PST than homeless people trying to replace their shoes. The NDP believes in these things because it is just another capitalist party indifferent to the global extinction event the capitalist system is producing. That must be why, for instance, the terms of reference of the government’s fracking study include the approval of continued fracking.

All the signs were there that this is where we were heading but I held on after the party enacted a fee to prevent poor people from seeking its nomination; I held on after the party approved Site C; I held on after the promise to keep BC’s minimum wage below New York’s, Seattle’s, Ontario’s and Alberta’s for the next four years; I held on after it became increasingly clear that the government is rigging the proportional representation referendum not just to fail but to discredit PR nationally for a generation.

But this nihilistic, headlong embrace of global climate villainy is too much. Go to hell, New Democrats. I am ashamed I gave you a second chance.

Yours truly,

Stuart Parker,

Surrey-Green Timbers Provincial Council Delegate

CC        Rachna Singh, MLA, Surrey-Green Timbers

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Secret History of the Failed NDP-Green Alliance of the 90s (part 1)

In September 1997, my most trusted advisor took me aside confidentially to show me something he had been working on for a few months. I had just been acclaimed to my second term as leader of the BC Green Party following sixteen-month period of instability in which my star candidate and his allies had been drumming up a series of non-scandals in an effort to prevent me from seeking a second consecutive term.

I was twenty-five years old and had served as leader of the BC Green Party for more than four years. I enjoyed the ongoing support of the party’s founders, Paul George and Adriane Carr, who ran BC’s then-largest environmental group, Western Canada Wilderness Committee. I had the support of Greenpeace co-founders and lifelong rivals Jim Bohlen and Paul Watson. Following Andy Shadrack’s two attempts to tar me with allegations of financial impropriety backfiring, it seemed like plain sailing for the BC Green Party.

We had run in seventy-one of seventy-five ridings and placed ahead of the Social Credit Party in the previous election. And thanks to Julian’s persuasive and tactical skills, Angus Reid had changed their polling methodology and we had jumped to 5% in provincial opinion polls. Julian and I had also teamed-up with Troy Lanigan of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation and Sonja Sanguinetti, president of the BC Liberal Party to create the Electoral Change Coalition, a collection of groups across the political spectrum representing more than 100,000 British Columbians in their membership rolls, calling for proportional representation.

But in that meeting, Julian suggested that we gamble all that and take the biggest political risk of our lives. He suggested that if we wanted to achieve real power in BC, we would have to reach some kind of accord with the NDP and follow the lead of European Green parties in forming a Red-Green governing alliance.

This would involve nothing short of a 180-degree turn in all my public statements about the New Democratic Party and unknown consequences for the base on which we relied to remain in charge of the Green Party’s governing council.

Let me be clear: we failed. Two and a half years later, we and everyone we had tried to make a deal with was out of a job, politically, except Art Vanden Berg, Canada’s first Green city councillor who would, by the end of his term, be sitting in the NDP municipal caucus in Victoria

I never achieved the high office John Horgan and Andrew Weaver have, nor am I an instantly-trustworthy stalwart for either group of partisans. Still, I think the Nobel Prize winner and premier-elect might benefit from knowledge of our small story from the 1990s and how such promising accords can come crashing down no matter how much they seem to be delivering. Maybe this cautionary tale can avert a similar fate for North America’s first Red-Green governing coalition.

Let’s begin with the poem I recited prior to every meeting after I adopted this plan:

There are those who would build the Temple,

And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.

In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet

There was no exception to the general rule.

In Shushan the palace, in the month of Nisan,

He served the wine to king Artaxerxes,

And he grieved for the broken city, Jerusalem;

And the King gave him leave to depart

That he might rebuild the city.

So he went, with a few, to Jerusalem,

And there, by the dragon’s well, by the dung gate,

By the fountain gate, by the king’s pool,

Jerusalem lay waste, consumed with fire;

No place for a beast to pass.

There were enemies without to destroy him,

And spies and self-seekers within,

When he and his men laid their hands to bebuilding the wall,

So they built as men must build

With the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.

In 1997, Julian reasoned that the first step towards a provincial coalition needed to be made where left-Green vote-splitting had produced the worst consequences. And so we began our project in Vancouver at the municipal level. The Coalition of Progressive Electors, which had formally absorbed the Civic NDP in 1993, had lost every seat on Vancouver city council, parks board and school board in 1996 and the mainstream media had placed the blame for the loss pretty squarely on us, the Green Party, after a spirited campaign in which our candidates got as much as 23% of the vote.

The fact that the NDP name was not attached to COPE also made them an easy starting point, along with the long history of crossing party lines with mixed slates of Communists and New Democrats. It was not hard to obtain an audience with COPE, still reeling from their first total electoral shutout since their founding in 1968. The late Frances Wasserlein took the lead on the COPE side in championing an alliance but, despite our shared interests and literal mutual destruction in the previous campaign, it was hard to cut a deal.

In particular, the electoral system proved a nearly insurmountable barrier in negotiations and led to the agreement’s ultimate unravelling during the 1999 campaign. COPE had been fighting for a single-member plurality first-past-the-post municipal voting system since its founding; “the ward system” as they euphemistically called it, was as close to a COPE article of faith as any policy could be. With the NDP generally winning a majority of provincial seats under first-past-the-post in Vancouver, implementing the same system municipally appeared to be a recipe for a permanent COPE majority.

But for Greens, this would mean, at best, chronic underrepresentation and, at worst, no representation at all, with our party’s vote evenly distributed across the city’s geography. In the end, Julian had to produce a series of maps for COPE showing that we could still implement municipal wards in the city even with the proportional representation that formed the foundation of our negotiating position. We also had to sacrifice all of our “limits to growth” and development freeze language from our policy in order for COPE to agree to a proportional system of municipal wards. But that took over a year of negotiating, to push that through, ultimately requiring the skill of our most personable negotiator, Paul Alexander, the first Green candidate to place third in a provincial election back in 1996.

By that time, I had moved to Victoria to join Art Vanden Berg who had only narrowly lost his 1996 municipal election bid to attempt to replicate the agreement with an official NDP affiliate and begin the work of fashioning some kind of provincial bargain. But there were other reasons to move by then. Shadrack and his allies, emboldened by my recent bout with clinical depression, had begun an aggressive campaign to remove me and my allies from the leadership of the party. As we hit 11% in the polls in the fall of 1998, there was a growing sense of urgency to move forward with the alliances because our time might be running out.

We might be inking deals with municipal NDP affiliates and the labour councils that backed them but, to do so, we were burning through our own political capital at an alarming rate. More on that in part 2.

BC Politics | fusangite |

The Return of David Anderson’s Liberal Party: Class in the BC Election – Part I

The wildcard in BC politics, from the mid-1950s until 1996 was the old Liberal Party of British Columbia. In the 1953 election, the Liberals were reduced from governing party to rump party, eking out a small space in nearly every BC legislature until their unexpected transformation into, to paraphrase Roy Romanow, the Social Credit witness protection program and, consequently, the new right-wing government in waiting.

The Liberals’ forty-nine years out of government, from their defeat in 1952 to their triumphant return to power in 2001 are often narrated as a time of failure and irrelevance, which is fine as far as it goes. But what such a story misses is what the Liberal Party was during those long years in the political wilderness. Why did the party keep going? Whom did it represent? What was it for? And how is it that we needed that thing so badly that we made this weird little party all over again, out of the unlikeliest raw materials?

In many ways, it was just like its third-party namesake in the United Kingdom, a perennial electoral bridesmaid, whose MPs hail from, as one commentator eloquently put it, “university towns and the Celtic fringe.” Such a description is a useful starting point for describing the old BC Liberals led by David Anderson, Arthur Laing, Pat McGeer and Gordon Gibson. The Liberals’ ridings were always the whitest in the province with a particularly Celtic aesthetic, containing either a university or one’s bedroom community.

The party’s leaders typically had advanced degrees; they were lawyers, medical doctors, university professors, as were most of the party’s small caucuses, which, until 1991, never represented more than four ridings at once. The core BC Liberal vote, which usually fell between 5% and 20%, was only sufficiently concentrated in a few places to produce sustained victories that lasted more than a term.

The party’s longest-held area was, of course, Oak Bay, followed by Vancouver-Point Grey, Victoria and then Vancouver’s North Shore. That is because Liberal voters could best be described as too rich to vote NDP, and too educated to vote Social Credit. Being a Liberal in BC during the Cold War, when the two main parties battled for the heart and soul of BC’s mining and logging towns and its volatile, populist proletariat, was not really about policy or political ideology. It was about class, a very particular performance of class.

Liberals could be spotted on sight, festooned in their Celtic tweeds and corduroys, with their fine white features and soft hands. Electing a Liberal MLA constituted the ultimate political assertion of secure, old money, the same way a Vancouver Lawn Tennis or University Women’s Club membership might. To be a Liberal was to be above the fray, so secure in one’s privilege as to tut dispassionately at the indecorous rubes who dominated the legislature.

Of course, in dire emergencies, it was sometimes necessary to make common cause with the coarse boozers and used car salesmen who kept the province in order for the companies whose shares the Liberals owned. In one rare emergency a couple of caucus members had to join the Social Credit Party’s cabinet. But that was the exception, not the rule. As long as the coal and timber flowed out through the port, privilege was about effacing one’s relationship to the populism and rentierism that structured BC’s economy and politics, showing one’s security by remaining above the fray, one’s job unconnected to boom-bust rentierism but instead of family trusts, the VSE, the local hospital or the UBC and UVic tenure streams.

When the BC Liberal Party was suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to shoulder the burden of running BC’s government for the province’s robber barons, the party chose a leader whose personal style and record could keep this constituency on board. Gordon Campbell, anointed by the Grande Dame of BC Liberalism, herself, May Brown, was the logical choice. While not a son of privilege, himself, Campbell was steeped in the values, culture and, of course, civic associations, of the BC Liberal tradition. In the hands of another, Campbell’s orgy of sweetheart deal privatizations and fire sales of the province’s assets might have been seen as simple corruption but he had that curious Liberal dignity that allowed him to invest this exercise with technocratic legitimacy, to redescribe simple looting as an esoteric experiment in the technocratic management of public assets.

Ironically, despite her much deeper roots in the BC Liberal tradition, Christy Clark lacks that gift and so, consequently, something of a seismic shift has been taking place in BC politics.

The old BC Liberals are back, led by a roiling mass of tweed, corduroy and messianic intellectual grandiosity, a man who, if they could have, would have been engineered by the old BC Liberals. Andrew Weaver, the incumbent MLA for the safest true Liberal seat in BC has everything: the tweeds, the corduroys, the elbow pads, a real, live proper British accent, a PhD, a professorship and a propensity to lecture his perceived inferiors on how to do their jobs. Not only that; he appears to decide how to vote on the government budget by tossing a coin, his reasons always unfathomable and obscure, conveying that he deems himself and his party above the fray when it comes to such small things the amount of money allocated to public schools.

Foolishly, my party has decided to field a prominent environmentalist against Dr. Weaver, as though the people of Oak Bay elected him based on his environmental credentials, as opposed to his perfect haute bourgeois aesthetic. What we needed was a candidate in an ascot, preferably owning both a yacht and a horse, and one with a higher-class accent than their opponent, managing their family trust’s nature conservancy. Then, we might have had a fighting chance!

But, as British Columbians adjust to the new meaning of “Green Party,” this will place limits on the brand’s appeal, as much as it might open opportunities, even in the party’s heartland. On the Island, north of Shawnigan Lake and Cobble Hill, people’s British accents don’t keep getting thicker every year as they do further south. In Nelson, even working class English accents are too snooty for an MLA candidate.

More fundamentally, performances of haute bourgeois indifference to the minutia of political economy are in shorter supply these days because of people’s very real, material insecurity, both environmentally and economically. The old BC Liberals are back, in the form of Weaver’s Greens, but does not so much signify their graduation to the status of contender as much as it does their entrapment in the most gratuitous, irrelevant part of electoral class politics in BC.

BC Politics | fusangite |