I have been trying to explain, for some time, how the rise of autocratic government and the collapse of democracy in Canada has taken a different route than in most of the world, and how the ways we nominate and legitimate candidates for elected office are the most top-down, elite-serving and anti-democratic in the Global North.
I have put this in various articles in various terms over the years, beginning with my warnings about the consequences of embedding a process called “vetting” in our nomination processes, following my own experience running afoul of this in 2010 (March 2010) and my return to this theme (May 2018). I have put this in terms of a labour systems problem and looking at the relationship between money, power and work in Canadian progressive civil society and parties (August 2016). I tried explaining the “russification” of Canadian political process and how, through a set of ad hoc, largely unprogrammatic decisions, between 1992 and 2009, political power was drained out of most institutions and people and into the offices of political party leaders (April 2015). I tried explaining this phenomenon from another perspective, looking at the political culture that led most Liberals and New Democrats to side with Stephen Harper and against their parties during the prorogation crisis of 2008, and how Canadians’ understanding of what it means to be a diverse country drove this (December 2008). I have also commented on how “progressive” measures supposedly serving “diversity” are absolutely contrary to efforts by working class, racialized people and women to install representatives who will serve their material concerns in the US (February 2019). And I have commented on how these ideas have been enacted within Canada’s New Democratic Party (May 2019).
But I still routinely talk to people with whom I otherwise agree, who are aware of my writing, at least in passing, who see “citizens’ assemblies” as an unqualified social and political good that should be more prevalent and powerful and who see candidate “vetting” as a thing to do right instead of wrong, rather than as anathema to the democratic process. So, clearly, I have done something wrong in my efforts to explain and sell my ideas. Consequently, I am going to write up as clearly and unambiguously as I can why these things are dangerous and bad and are wrecking Canada, and, as I go, explain how they are partly my fault and apologize for them.
To begin, I want to define some terms to refer to opposite concepts that people see as the same thing and use interchangeably:
Demographically representative: A body of people is demographically representative when it is composed of identity groups reflecting a microcosm of society at large. If a particular group or place is 51% female, the small group should be as close to 51% female as possible. If the particular group is 12% gay and lesbian, the smaller group should be as close as possible to 12% gay or lesbian. If the group or place is 40% liberal, the smaller group should be close to 40% liberal. If the group or place is 40% Liberal, the smaller group should be too. A demographically representative group is a microcosm of society and it is “representative” in the sense that it has the closest possible superficial resemblance to the larger group from which it was extracted. Until the 1990s, demographically representative samples were used in two places: market research/polling i.e. focus groups, and academic research in the health and social sciences i.e. focus groups and test cohorts.
Demographically representative groups were used to discover certain kinds of knowledge. The knowledge they were designed to discover was this: assuming the continuation of the status quo and with no significant change in the social order, how might individuals and groups react to a product, policy, event or health hazard? In other words, the premise of a focus group is to forecast outcomes provided the social order remains fundamentally unchanged. When focus groups were conceived of during the Cold War, nobody thought of the people in these groups as representing the interests of their identity group(s) as a whole. The information one might gain from a college-educated, working class, gay Filipino in a focus group would be how an individual typical of this set of groups might react to something. No one understood an individual focus group member to be a representative of or advocate for the interests of the groups they “represented” because that is not the sense in which the word “represent” was to be understood. Representation referred to resemblance, not to a position of advocacy for shared interests.
Democratically representative: This is a much older idea. The idea of democratic representation is that a group of people organize and come together for the purpose of concentrating their power in the hands of a representative individual in order to exercise political power. The more people participate in this act of upward delegation through voting or some other process, the more democratic the process is and the more power is concentrated in the representative.
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Often when people on the political left talk about representation, they talk past one another. Some people believe that Julian Castro is the 2020 Democratic primary contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true. He is clearly the most demographically representative. Some people believe that Bernie Sanders is the contender who is most representative of LatinX people. That is true too. He is the most democratically representative.
But I am not merely saying that these things are equally good and just different. My point is that making your elite demographically representative of the majority whom it oppresses makes that elite more secure and undermines democracy. In his book, City Trenches, Ira Katznelson lays this out. He explains that whom a representative serves is determined not by the identity groups the person is identified with, but rather who gives that person power and on whom they rely to maintain that power.
On more than one occasion, I have used the example of the Ottoman Empire to illustrate this. An Ottoman caliph (emperor) would choose a court demographically representative of the empire because the court’s job was to maintain the empire’s hierarchical order. If the caliph appointed a Greek Orthodox vizier (prime minister), the vizier served the interests of the caliph because the caliph could hire or fire him at will. But a vizier also had a larger interest: the continued domination of Greek orthodox people into the empire, because were Greeks to leave and form their own country, his appointment would no longer be demographically representative. Because a caliph’s court was a rhetorical project to show the empire as harmonious and diverse, even unrest among Greek orthodox Ottomans was contrary to a vizier’s interests. When an elite group of representatives is selected based on demographic representation, but is chosen from above and not through democratic representation, its interests and actions are not just unconnected to those; they are typically contrary to the interests of those in their identity groups.
This is something human beings have long understood. But modern liberals and progressives use etiquette and affect politics to prevent discussion of how this is shaking out, and instead attempt to impose a collective amnesia with respect to this foundational sociological knowledge.
This collective amnesia and failure of analysis has resulted in progressives hornswoggling other parts of the left into supporting two terrible ideas that contribute directly to the continuing decline of democracy in Canada and the centralization of power in a small group: citizens’ assemblies and candidate vetting.
