A neighbour of mine who'll turn 80 next week sometimes asks what's happened in recent years, has the world gone crazy? She's having trouble making sense of why so many of us, especially Americans, are doing what we're doing. It's becoming increasingly harder to argue with that sentiment.
Take the States. Polls show that a majority of Americans support everything from gun control to universal health care, action on climate change and reversing spreading inequality and yet they wind up with a unitary government of Republicans controlling the House, Senate and the White House. The rightwing also dominates the Supreme Court of the United States. Somebody elected all those representatives and senators and, well, that president too.
Sure gerrymandering plays a big role but so does big money, money big enough to saddle America with a thoroughly "bought and paid for" Congress. Big money has swept aside any vestige of "government of the people, by the people and for the people" and big money intends to see that notion doesn't return. Big money leads to legislative capture, regulatory capture, even executive branch capture and, through all that, judicial capture.
Are we that much better when a party that grabs a minority of the votes, high 30s will do, walks away with a majority and the virtually unfettered power to govern the country for four years no matter what the other 60 plus per cent may want? And then, once they get that majority, they shrug their shoulders and turn their backs on just about every solemn promise they made to dupe voters into giving them that high 30 per cent, false majority.
That's "fuck you" squared. Electoral reform? Absolutely, well no. Social licence. Sure, well no. First Nations consultation? Cross my heart, well no. Honest environmental assessments. Damn straight, well no. Reforming the surveillance state? Did you really expect we would? Well no. It goes on and on and on. You want it? You got it, well no. But don't fret. It wasn't all for nothing. The other guy was worse, wasn't he? Isn't getting rid of him reward enough?
No, that's not enough. If you get a majority without the support of 60 per cent of the voting public then your legitimacy hangs by a thread and that thread is honouring your campaign promises. If you renege on those solemn commitments then you jettison your legitimacy with them. You have confessed to conning the gullible, the people who so wanted to believe, to get your lying ass into power. You've done what the guy before you did with all his talk about "transparency" and "accountability."
The very foundation of our democracy is the "informed consent" of the voter. When someone betrays the public, as Trudeau has done so fulsomely, it makes a mockery of informed consent.
A government as free from its obligations as this one, and several of its predecessors before it, does not govern with the informed consent of the electorate. It rules them. It reigns over them, imposing its will, not honouring theirs. That is the antithesis of democracy. It offends me deeply.
I guess I was wrong. I do "get it" after all.
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