Canada’s loyal progressives

The iconoclasts in our public parks will not win Time Magazine’s award as news-maker of the year. Their ambitions are not as dangerous or as audacious as those building pro-democracy movements in Middle East autocracies. Further, it is not clear whether they wish to reform or undo the existing order, whether they will propel our politics forward—or back. 

Nevertheless, progressive, anti-establishment voices in Canada and the United States are getting greater attention. So far, in Canada, however, a sad pattern of mimicry and separation is repeating itself.

Young Canadian progressives haven’t missed a beat: their distress with the existing political and economic order matches American sentiments, sound bite for sound bite. They too have been taught recently to fear for their economic security and the survival of the planet.

It was a dare by the Vancouver magazine Adbusters that launched the OWS movement. (You’d probably have to live in mellow Vancouver, if not California, to imagine telling people in New York, Chicago, and Toronto to occupy park spaces from late September on through to “victory.” Napoleon certainly didn’t wait until the end of the summer of 1812 to get started for Moscow.)

The latest American symbols of discontent have infiltrated Canada’s political culture. “Vote mobs” are organized to excite university students to vote. The Liberal Party—the party of competence—now wants to be called a “movement” and may adopt the US primary system to pick a leader, bottom up. The New Democrats and everyone but CEOs and Stephen Harper now imagine Canadian society as 99% middle-class and 1% unconsciously rich.

The leadership that is striving to mobilize young activists, however, is often strikingly conventional. When the best of them reach 40, they’ll likely be wearing Order of Canada pins.

For example, read Gary Mason's report on the “whip smart” young drivers of the 60,000-member Leadnow.ca political action organization. Its co-founder, Jamie Biggar, has a perspective that is is inclusive and politely overwrought.

““I think there is a sense, particularly among young people, that a lot of the systems and institutions in our society are really broken,” Mr. Biggar told me. “And there is a deep desire, I think, to work not just on becoming more effective within the system we have today, but also starting to look at how we can make it better, how we can create a more equal society, how we can achieve deep sustainability.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/british-columbia/gary_mason/building-a-progressive-voice-with-focus/article2250565/

Mason reports that this movement has modeled itself on the 5-million-strong MoveOn.org in the United States.

MoveOn.org, however, is more straightforward. Since its birth in 1998, it has campaigned against a Republican president and for a Democrat, Barack Obama. It has worked the two-party system with a vengeance; it’s not waiting for electoral reform. It recruits volunteers and registers voters year-round. It’s out to influence the outcome of national elections; it wants more progressives in Washington, where progressive issues are best advanced.

Instead of rediscovering Washington, as Canadian progressives did in the 60s and in the election of 2008, Leadnow.ca doggedly focuses on Ottawa.

On every objective from greater social justice to environmental sustainability, health to education reform, and environmental sustainability, it looks to Canada’s federal Parliament. It seems to want to get back to updating Jean Chretien 1990’s Throne Speeches.

                        Click on: http://leadnow.ca/declaration

They’re missing the mark. The two battlefields that should matter most for progressive Canadians are Canadian provinces and Washington. Ottawa is a cul-de-sac for great ideas. It’s a center of escapist politics, if not the capital of a conservative country. 

Progressives can make Canada a little more civilized. However, Canada’s Parliament can’t deliver any strategic gains for this continent—or for the globe. Big changes worthy of the rhetoric of the new radicals can, however, be secured through direct participation in American federal politics.

Will Canadian progressives ask again: can the Canadian Dream of the 19th century serve their dreams for the 21st?  

Message to OWS movement: winter is coming

Snow in Zuccotti Park demonstrates that the Wall Street occupiers are hardy. Sympathy for their discomfort, however, should not delay thinking about the political value of what they’re doing.

You don’t have to be a Canadian or Dylan’s weatherman to fear that winter is coming. And provisions must be made.

The occupiers may not like the words politics, party, platform, media-buys, and lobby, and they may truly believe they’re innocent—and that everything at the top is corrupt. However, for the next twelve months it is representative democracy—not tent democracies of the likeminded—that will determine the climate in which they and we will live for a long, perilous time.

The aesthetic of the OWS movement has been widely reported. Writer Michael Greenberg enthused in the latest New York Review of Books that the nearly all-inclusive catchphrase “We are the 99 percent” has a “galvanizing succinctness.” The occupiers’ insistence that they repeat every word uttered by their celebrity speakers, he notes, created a kind of “euphoria of camaraderie.”  

He quotes Adbuster’s protest launch declaration:

“Together lets live a little more on the wild side, launch a few telling cultural interventions and pull off some surprising pranks, jams and other essential mental resuscitations.”

And then he comments:

“The antic, Dadaist tone is telling. This is a movement that addresses the mind, not the belly—‘mental environmentalism,’ the founders of Adbusters dubbed it, an antidote to the ‘pollution of our minds’ by ‘infotoxins…commercial messaging and the financial and ethical catastrophes that loom before humanity. This sounds more like something that was cooked up in a university linguistics class than by conventional grassroots populists.”

Click on: www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/zuccotti-park/

The occupiers say they are apolitical. Greenberg faithfully reports that “To them, ‘leaderless’ is not an insult but an ideal.” This is a ruse or a delusion. Squatters occupy places; movements organize their ideas and look for leaders to hasten change.

Their claim that the world has been poisoned by the few is political; it’s a claim against organized society. Their chants are no more above politics than the chants of ultra-nationalists in the '30s who pined to purify the homeland.

Declaring 99 percent of America’s shareholders politically innocent and not responsible for the nation’s shortcomings is dishonest. More importantly, it denies any responsibility for influencing the choices that will be taken in a dyspeptic 50/50 US election next fall.

Let’s give this latest movement its due: it has irony and the Tea Party had none. Its pranks will survive in the culture for a while. However, the Tea Party today is only one step away from accomplishing its declared and antagonistic agenda: enfeebling America’s federal government as an instrument of popular economic and social progress.

The OWS movement echoes the Tea Party’s radical claim: that Washington is working for the bankers—the “others”—and not them. Now having helped diminish confidence in representative democracy, the Tea Party is doing precisely what progressives did in 2008—integrating their resources with another national party to elect a president that’s closer to their way of thinking.

The slogans “Take back America” and “We are the 99 percent” both deny the authority and importance of America’s political center and denigrate representative democracy.

Republicans have figured out that 51 per cent gives you power. Democrats should be in the parks, not with blankets, but membership cards. In a multi-party, mass democracy, neither manipulators nor drop-outs are innocent.