What Then Must We Do? Canada's Place Alongside the United States in Turbulent Times.

Do you ever wonder how close the United States may be to abandoning democracy? Do you ever wonder what that might mean for Canada? Are you familiar with the word, "anschluss"?

Even The Economist recently rated the US as a "flawed democracy."  That might have been overly generous. A paper released by Princeton in 2014 written by two professors, Gilens (Princeton) and Page (Northwestern), contrasted the voting record of Congress to the public will and reached the compelling conclusion that democracy had yielded to plutocracy in the American state. America's "bought and paid for" Congress had been "captured" by narrow, powerful interests and had ceased to serve the public interest. America was in the process of transforming into an oligarchy.

We watched as America's legislatures, state and federal, were captured. The telltale signs included the thwarting of campaign finance reform, the rise of a dominant corporate media cartel (think Sinclair Broadcasting) and the arrival of organizations such as ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, where captured legislators made pilgrimage to be given industry-drafted bills to take back and pass into law.

This sort of big money corruption is gangrenous and, true to form, it quickly spread to regulatory capture where representatives of regulated industries come to control the quasi-judicial boards that regulate those same industries. Trump's poster boy for this is EPA head, Scott Pruitt, who is out to dismantle most environmental regulations.

A lot of the corruption-fueled decline in American democracy predates Donald Trump but the Mango Mussolini has been a powerful catalyst who may propel the United States into a new level of authoritarianism, possibly extending into outright fascism.

When it comes to global leadership, Trump spurns America's traditional allies but has revealed a preternatural affinity for tyrants including some of the most murderous. Trump sees the retreat of liberal democracy through much of the world and will not come to its aid or defence.

Trump has little time for America's vaunted system of checks and balances. He does not recognize three co-equal branches of government. He regularly attacks law enforcement and the judiciary. He is intent on contaminating the US Supreme Court by transforming it into a partisan political agency. Neither Congress nor the American people seem to realize that a partisan political Supreme Court cannot uphold justice in the land. The Rule of Law becomes meaningless. Trump insists that the Department of Justice works for him, not the nation. When impartiality is extinguished what remains is one party rule and when that is coupled with an imperial presidency you have one-man rule.

As American public intellectual, Henry Giroux, recently wrote:

While the United States under Trump may not be an exact replica of Hitler’s Germany, the mobilizing ideas, policies, passions and ruthless social practices of fascism, wrapped in the flag and discourses of racial purity, ultra-nationalism and militarism, are at the center of power in the Trump administration. 

When selected elements of history are suppressed and historical consciousness and memory no longer provide insights into the workings of repression, exploitation and resistance, people are easily trapped in forms of historical and social amnesia that limit their sense of perspective, their understanding of how power works and the ways in which the elements of fascism sustain themselves in different practices.

Before America's Electoral College handed Trump the presidency, several scholars who listened to his campaign rhetoric observed that Trump's vision of reforming the United States government strayed well into the extra-constitutional. Trump would have to go rogue, unconstitutional. To do that he would need to subdue or disable both the judicial and legislative branches of government. He's done a good job with House leader, Paul Ryan, and Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. With two, possibly even three more, Supreme Court vacancies in the near future, he can probably capture the already compromised judiciary also. Then it's just a matter of a Reichstag Fire.

These are problems that the American people will have to address. Perhaps they're willing to accept a post-democratic authoritarian government, strong man rule. That's their call.  Canadians, however, will be impacted by developments south of the 49th parallel perhaps more than ever in the history of our two nations.

We need to start considering how the decline of American democracy will alter the relationship between our nations; how it may impact us as individuals; whether we need to formulate some bottom line or red lines that will limit or regulate dealings between our countries. Are we at risk of succumbing to this American contagion? Should we be taking steps to rehabilitate and renew liberal democracy in Canada? Is democracy really all that secure in the True North or are we deluding ourselves? Can we afford this "open border" policy we once took such pride in? There are doubtless many issues we need to consider, questions we need to ask.

We're going to have to figure this out somehow. America is changing. It already has changed. It's not the beacon of democracy any more. To ignore that, to pretend that it's still Ozzie & Harriet and that the 2020 presidential elections will provide some magical reset button is delusional. Being next door neighbours leaves us uniquely exposed and vulnerable to this new America that seems intent on trying to forestall its decline by throwing out the rule books and exacting tribute from friend and adversary alike.

Churchill famously opined that America could always be counted on to do the right thing, after it had exhausted every other option. I wish that still held true. It doesn't. The right thing seems to have lost its currency in Washington.

This is as good a time as any to start talking among ourselves. We have a lot of catching up to do.

Liberal Democracy Cannot Survive Undefended.

Since the advent of the neoliberal era, the reign of Thatcher, Reagan and Mulroney, liberal democracy has been left to its own devices. The warning sign, the red flag, was the extinction of any meaningful vestige of progressivism from the body politic.

The last defender of liberal democracy we knew in Canada was Pierre Trudeau who bequeathed to us the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that, coupled with a courageous Supreme Court, thwarted the worst undemocratic instincts of subsequent prime ministers notably Stephen Harper and even Justin Trudeau.

The decline of neoliberalism was marked by the evolution of a corporate media cartel, a wholesale shift in the balance between labour and capital, and the development of the corporate state whose leaders preferred to operate in the boardrooms rather than the livingrooms of the nation.

Harper may have dragged Canada's political centre far to the right but both the Liberals and the New Democrats followed complacently in his wake. The Liberals became 'conservative-lite' while the New Dems positioned themselves as 'latter-day liberals.' What Harper had wrought they chose not to undo. In the process the Liberal Party of Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau became untethered from the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson and Pierre Trudeau. The New Democrats of Layton and Mulcair strayed from the party of Douglas, Lewis and Broadbent. In so doing all three parties pulled the rug out from under liberal democracy.

Across the political spectrum, liberal democracy flourishes in a smallish band located at the centre, neither hard right nor hard left. Picture in your mind a circle. At the very top you have totalitarianism. At the very bottom you have liberal democracy. As you move from the bottom, whether to the right or left, liberal democracy is gradually displaced by authoritarianism of the sort we're seeing in today's emerging nationalist/populist movements. Today we're heading mainly to the right, a path that sees democracy steadily displaced by plutocracy and then oligarchy. Beyond that, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Andrew Sullivan recently wrote of this movement in Europe and the United States. The article was titled, "Is the World Done with Liberal Democracy?" He makes the case that it is.

At the risk of inviting howls of scorn and derision, I mention today's column in The Globe by John Ibbitson, "Ontario has lost its political centre."

The political centre is collapsing in Ontario, polarizing between social democrats and populist conservatives. We thought it couldn’t happen here. It’s happening here. And it poses a grave threat to the Liberal Party, both provincially and federally.

No party has plans to balance the provincial budget, align new spending with available resources, seek practical, incremental change. For both parties, the centre is the enemy. 

Such a polarization between well-to-the-left and populist right challenges the electoral base of the federal Liberals. While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may be able to work with an NDP government, the PC’s plans to eliminate the carbon tax flies in the face of a core federal commitment to fight climate change.

Maybe a year and a half of Doug Ford would make Mr. Trudeau look good to Ontario voters. Or maybe things would become so toxic that polarization infects federal politics as well. 

Is the social democratic/populist conservative schism in Ontario permanent? That’s impossible to say. Had the PCs chosen a more conventional conservative as leader, had Ms. Wynne stepped aside when there was still a chance for the Liberals to renew the party, we might not be talking about schisms.

It seems odd to read Ibbitson lamenting developments that he and his kind have done so much to nurture and empower.

Here’s the big question: Would a Ford government enable the haters, even though he espouses no such hatred himself? Would the alt-right interpret a Premier Ford as carte blanche to demand an end to immigration, to target visible minorities, to proclaim that Ontario is Christian and white?

We’ll find out the answer if Mr. Ford wins. Ms. Horwath is determined to stop him. All we know for sure is that, at least in Ontario, at least for now, the centre no longer holds.

Ibbitson is beginning to sound much like the NYT's David Brooks' day-late laments about Donald Trump soiling of the Republican Party. A pox on them both.

Yet more disturbing is the notion of Justin Trudeau as the essential gatekeeper of liberal democracy in Canada. There's a huge difference between setting out to destroy liberal democracy and doing anything meaningful to defend it. Trudeau is no Stephen Harper but that doesn't mean that liberal democracy is safe in his hands.

My father planted in his young son's mind the reality that we didn't have a right or freedom that hadn't been paid for, often more than once, in blood. Over the years I came to understand that every right and freedom we hold has a greater value to those who might deprive us of it than we ever perceive it to be worth. Here we are.

Taking Democracy for Granted. Are We On This Road Too?

Andrew Sullivan has a thought-provoking essay in New York Magazine about how we're killing off liberal democracy and not just in Poland or Hungary or the United States either.

This elite condescension toward challenges to their power stems, philosopher John Gray recently argued, from a fundamental and demonstrably false assumption that liberal democracy and a transnational world order are the ultimate end points of history. The narrative was set in 1989 and, for elites, it cannot be relinquished now. What we’re witnessing, with Trump, Putin, and Xi, is just a detour, liberal democrats tell themselves, before normal service resumes. 

But “what if we were wrong?” as Obama asked in the wake of Trump’s victory, according to Ben Rhodes’s new memoir of the White House years. “Maybe we pushed too far.” You think? A ruinous war, a devastating recession, trade policies that wiped out so many communities, soaring debt, and wage stagnation: Not a great record for the liberal democratic elites, is it?

And this record is why the most probable future is not about liberal democracy and internationalism, but about populist nationalism, with a distinctly “strongman” flavor.  

...the strongman model is proliferating: Putin in Russia has dropped all pretense of democracy; Xi is now the first president of China for life; Erdogan in Turkey is still not done enlarging his powers; Netanyahu will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, governing on the basis of ethno-nationalism, suspicious of his own deep state, including the Mossad, and cementing a Jewish state from the river to the sea. 

And in the U.S., of course, the omens are not good right now. Trump himself is resurgent in the polls — his disapproval-approval gap was -20 points last December; it’s -11 points almost six months later. On the generic ballot, the Democrats’ lead has sunk from 13 points to 6 in the last five months. The party is in shambles in Southern California, one of its key regions for regaining control of the House. Sean Trende now believes that continued GOP control of Congress is perfectly possible, even probable. Since, it seems to me, the midterms are our only real shot at checking our own strongman, this is demoralizing.

...Trump knows that most Americans are not going to read the fact-checks. And his pitch is so relentless, his ballsmanship so huge, that, in the end, the path of least resistance seems the most practical response. Even now, his repeated, unfounded calumnies against the Mueller inquiry, the Justice Department, and the FBI are working. Belief that Mueller is partisan is growing; confidence in the investigation has sunk; Trump has almost succeeded in making Russia’s intervention in the 2016 elections seem as if it were designed to support Hillary. A majority still hasn’t bought this. But, with a GOP “kinda taking a nap somewhere,” when it isn’t echoing every single lie and delusion of the Supreme Leader, the relentless propaganda is having an effect. Unless Mueller has evidence so astounding that even Sean Hannity draws a breath, the special-counsel probe could also be a political winner for Trump. If he’s impeached, barring an economic collapse, he won’t be convicted in a million years, and his reelection, once unthinkable, now has to be seen as likely. 

In the end, most people just give in to the lie completely. It’s easier than constantly resisting a malignant, relentless narcissist. Or you tune out. It’s perfectly understandable. Covering this degeneration for the last year and a half has stressed me beyond any expectation. I may be missing a looming, massive tide for the Democrats this fall, and I hope I am. But it is perfectly possible that we will soon be entering the next phase of Trump: when the lie becomes the truth entirely.

An Excellent Introduction to Neoliberalism. How Our Political Caste Came to Serve the Special Interest Over the Public Interest.

The first thing you need to know about neoliberalism is that it's made up. It's an economic ideology, one of a succession of belief-based theories that have come and gone on a 30 to 40-year cycle for the past two centuries. It is a belief-based construct, similar to other philosophies or faith-based religions. Neoliberalism has, for a number of very bad reasons, become deeply embedded and remarkably hard to shake off even though it failed and has triggered a variety of destructive social outcomes including inequality, the accumulation of economic and political power in the hands of a few and the weakening of liberal democracy. It isn't finished wreaking havoc on our society and our politicians do not even raise a finger to stop it.

A lot of us see neoliberalism, manifested in the rise of market power and the spread of globalism, as a plague on society. It is a plague on democratic society. That purpose was forged almost a century ago in Austria as it emerged from the ashes of WWI.

With the end of the war, Austria became a democratic republic, and socialist candidates won repeated victories in its cosmopolitan capital, Vienna. From 1918 to 1934, “Red” Vienna became a model city for democratic socialism, with social housing and expanded schooling for children and adults, all protected by a militant labor movement. The city inspired one resident, Karl Polanyi, to a lifelong defense of social democracy. Red Vienna, he wrote, caused “a moral and intellectual rise in the condition of a highly developed industrial working class,” which “achieved a level never reached before by the masses of the people in any industrial society.”

...Ludwig von Mises, an economist in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, wanted to restore free trade and the sanctity of property. The prewar version of the Austro-Hungarian empire became a point of reference for Mises and those who joined the study circle he organized: It had been a multi-ethnic empire that lowered barriers to trade while not insisting on cultural homogeneity. A relatively small, landlocked place like Austria, they reasoned, could never be economically self-sufficient in the industrial age. It had to be open to the world market, and to succeed there it would have to be competitive.

The labor movement, then, was a further obstacle to the realization of Mises’s project. The same forces that inspired Polanyi, Mises found oppressive. Labor unions marched in the streets, demanding higher-than-market wages and lower-than-market housing. The city kept budgets balanced with high and progressive taxes, and businesses fared about as well as elsewhere in Austria. But social housing undermined the position of landlords, and the bourgeoisie felt targeted by taxes on conspicuous consumption. For a time, there was even a dog tax that scaled upward with the breed and pedigree of the dog. Mises saw Red Vienna as a standoff between the power of labor and the power of capital. He was pleased when an anti-fascist uprising was violently suppressed in 1927—leaving dozens dead and more than a thousand injured—since it broke the power of the social democratic masses to mobilize. 

Democracy, for Mises, was not an absolute value to be respected at all times. It was a good system insofar as it made peaceful, gradual change possible. Democracy’s “function is to make peace,” he wrote, “to avoid violent revolutions.” When it failed in that task, Mises thought that enforcing order by other means was preferable to letting democracy destroy the economic foundations of prosperity, as he understood them. Although it is frequently said that neoliberals want a weak state, in which the market can be left to do most of the work, that is not quite correct. Against the enemies of the market—economic nationalism and democratic demands—the state has to play a role, mostly by creating a system of laws that protects property and by representing enough force to deter challenges. 

The neoliberals sought to “encase” markets, not to liberate them. Their project was not anarchy: It was a global system that sufficiently ordered the world so that capitalism would be safe from certain forms of political interference. Friedrich Hayek, who had worked under Mises, imagined an organization independent of any one country that would set the rules of the market. Hayek envisioned separate cultural and economic governments: The former would satisfy the demand for mass participation, while the latter would make sure that democratic enthusiasms did not interfere with the functioning of markets across the world. The neoliberal world, “is not a borderless market without states but a doubled world kept safe from mass demands for social justice and redistributive equality by the guardians of the economic constitution.” Neoliberalism places property, in other words, beyond the reach of democracy.

In the wake of the next world war, the leading neoliberals formed the Mont Pelerin Society.  The neoliberal world view became clear from their approach to the apartheid regime of South Africa and the rise of Pinochet in Chile.

Hayek himself called apartheid “both an injustice and an error.” The system interfered, after all, with the allocation of resources, by keeping black Africans from participating in free markets and preventing them from the most efficient application of their talents and labor. Yet granting black South Africans suffrage rights would inevitably lead to a reordering of property relations, since the black majority would favor reclaiming land that had been taken by white settlers. This was unacceptable in Hayek’s view. 

Within the Mont Pelerin Society, the problem of how to end colonialism without destroying property rights was much debated. The English economist William Hutt imagined that voting power in postapartheid South Africa could be made proportional to economic weight. Milton Friedman agreed that one man, one vote would be terrible for South Africa, and Hayek worried that putting sanctions on South Africa would upset the global order. They didn’t favor apartheid, but they were against almost anything that might bring it to an end. 

The story is a similar one in Chile. Hayek visited Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship twice and met with Pinochet once. During his second visit, Hayek told a Chilean newspaper that it was possible for a “dictator to govern in a liberal way,” and that he preferred a “liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism.” Given the widespread use of torture by Pinochet’s government, this has often been seen by critics of neoliberalism as a link between the intellectual architect of neoliberalism and authoritarian repression, while Hayek’s defenders have seen it as an aberration. In fact, it was simply consistent with the way that he saw the world: The socialism of Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet had overthrown, was democracy gone wrong. Restoring a market economy took priority over human rights and social justice. A dictatorship was not desirable, but he objected more to those who protested its abuses.

Neoliberalism in the 21st century.

The current rules all but ensure that governments act in the interests of capital, since, if businesses do not like a certain country’s policies (say, a proposal that corporations pay their fair share of taxes), they can disrupt the economy by abruptly withdrawing from that country. Preserving the rights of capital is the goal, even when that means sacrificing democratic demands. That is why our world is a more neoliberal one than it once was, and why it matters. However fractious and internally contradictory neoliberal thought may be, and however overused it can be as a term, it is describing something real. 

It is the nature of ideologies to see some things clearly and place other things out of view—to serve up a combination of useful concepts and to conceal self-interest. Sets of ideas that become influential can usually do a great deal of the latter. The point is surely not that neoliberalism is wrong about everything: It makes sense to seek to avoid hyperinflation, for example, and it is reasonable to note that price fluctuations in market economies provide information to consumers and business owners about how to behave—if apples become scarce, and their price goes up, consumers can substitute, say, cheaper oranges.

...But the things that neoliberalism has trouble seeing are, at the present, far more consequential: deep inequalities, accompanied by a sense of powerlessness, of being left behind by a global system that operates with no regard for the interests or voice of the majority.  ...The rise of the far right in the United States and Europe cannot be explained solely as a reaction against neoliberal globalization (not least because many of its supporters are thriving economically), but the financial crisis of 2008—caused by inadequate regulation—did give the far right its opportunity to grow. 

Furthermore, the primacy of capital in neoliberalism means that crises will be resolved on the backs of the poor, with cuts to the welfare state and public services, though it is not the poor who cause them. Even the International Monetary Fund, which demanded austerity as a response to debt crises in the 1980s, now acknowledges that some neoliberal ideas have been oversold, concluding that increased inequality hurts “the level and sustainability of growth.” Similarly, much of the economics profession has moved on from neoliberalism, recognizing that there are many ways to operate a healthy economy. Dani Rodrik* points out that rich countries have public sectors ranging in size from 33 percent to nearly 60 percent of gross domestic product. A large state sector is not the antithesis of personal liberty: Indeed, it can sustain it.

What neoliberalism misses or ignores is that a world of apparently neutral rules is still a world of power inequalities. When capital has more freedom than people, serious democratic deficits are guaranteed. Voters may prefer a strong welfare state, but they may get austerity instead. In many nations, including the United States, the power of money in politics gives concentrated wealth a sword to hold over democracy’s neck.

It's important to realize that neoliberalism, despite its grip on the developed nations, is merely an ideology. Like any of the thousands of religions man has devised over the millennia, neoliberalism is a faith-based construct. It is not etched in stone. It did not come down from the mountains inscribed on tablets.

Neoliberalism is belief-based. Before his death, even America's leading neoliberal, Milton Friedman, admitted that neoliberalism was a failed experiment. It was an ideology, one that ascended to a cult-like status as it conquered the political arena. Friedman was telling the truth, it was deeply flawed and it has failed. Our political caste, however, are maintaining the status quo, keeping neoliberalism on life support despite the deep social injuries it inflicts. It's as though they can't imagine what follows and are waiting for the next ideological messiah to arrive. That day may never come.

In my view the antithesis of neoliberalism is progressivism, the belief in popular democracy espoused by Abraham Lincoln and the Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin. It is progressivism that places labour ahead of capital. It is progressivism that holds capital and capitalism must advance the wellbeing of the state and its people. It is progressivism that does not shy away from wealth redistribution as championed by Theodore Roosevelt who said:

One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows. 

At many stages in the advance of humanity, this conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess is the central condition of progress. In our day it appears as the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests, who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.

I've looked around but I still can find nothing remotely as promising as a return to progressivism to heal the wounds inflicted on our society, our nation, by the neoliberals.

*It was Harvard economist Dani Rodrick who warned of what he called "the inescapable trilemma of the world economy":

“democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three but never have all three simultaneously and in full”

"...Historically, the rise of capitalism and the pressure for an ever-broader suffrage went together. This is why the richest countries are liberal democracies with, more or less, capitalist economies. Widely shared increases in real incomes played a vital part in legitimising capitalism and stabilising democracy. Today, however, capitalism is finding it far more difficult to generate such improvements in prosperity. On the contrary, the evidence is of growing inequality and slowing productivity growth. This poisonous brew makes democracy intolerant and capitalism illegitimate. 

"...Consider the disappointing recent performance of global capitalism, not least the shock of the financial crisis and its devastating effect on trust in the elites in charge of our political and economic arrangements. Given all this, confidence in an enduring marriage between liberal democracy and global capitalism seems unwarranted. 

"So what might take its place? One possibility would be the rise of a global plutocracy and so in effect the end of national democracies. As in the Roman empire, the forms of republics might endure but the reality would be gone. (Was it not Trudeau who declared Canada a "post national" country?)

"An opposite alternative would be the rise of illiberal democracies or outright plebiscitary dictatorships, in which the elected ruler exercises control over both the state and capitalists. This is happening in Russia and Turkey. Controlled national capitalism would then replace global capitalism. Something rather like that happened in the 1930s. It is not hard to identify western politicians who would love to go in exactly this direction. 

"...Meanwhile, those of us who wish to preserve both liberal democracy and global capitalism must confront serious questions. One is whether it makes sense to promote further international agreements that tightly constrain national regulatory discretion in the interests of existing corporations. My view increasingly echoes that of Prof Lawrence Summers of Harvard, who has argued that “international agreements [should] be judged not by how much is harmonised or by how many barriers are torn down but whether citizens are empowered”. Trade brings gains but cannot be pursued at all costs."

More recently, professor Rodrik, discussed populism. He distinguished negative from positive populism. Negative nationalism, the variety favoured by authoritarian and illiberal states, is a blend of paranoia and xenophobia. It posits the "other" as a threat. Positive nationalism is internal and focuses on what is right and good within one's nation and what can be done to make it better. Negative nationalism perceives the nation as awash in threats and perils. Positive nationalism works to improve.

If our economic rules empower corporations and financial interests excessively, then the correct response is to rewrite those rules — at home as well as abroad. If trade agreements serve mainly to reshuffle income to capital and corporations, the answer is to rebalance them to make them friendlier to labor and society at large. If governments feel themselves powerless to institute the tax policies and regulations needed to address the dislocations caused by economic and technological shocks, the solution is not just to seek more national autonomy but also to deploy it toward such reforms. 

A populism of this kind can seem like a frontal attack on the economic sacred cows of the day — just as earlier waves of American populism were. But it is an honest populism that stands a chance of achieving its stated objectives, without harming fundamental democratic norms of tolerance and equal citizenship.

An Election Should Never Become a Defeat for the People.

Sure, there are winners and losers in an election, but that should be confined to politicians and parties. The people should never be vanquished.  The public should never lose an election. Yet they routinely do.

That's especially true for what we in Canada endure today in our multi-party, first-past-the-post system where a party can garner scarcely 40 per cent support and yet receive a powerful majority. To "rule" with 40 per cent support and consider that some sort of mandate to do whatever you fucking well like is, frankly, despotic. It's the antithesis of democracy. When, as in the case of the current regime, that minority/majority was won on empty promises, it's that much worse.

Canadians have become accustomed to that. We acquiesce in it. They got 36 per cent, you got 38 and so you're the master of the universe until we get a chance to see our will defeated again in four years. Fuck That!

When governments do that, as so many of ours have, you're not just defeating your political opponent, you're defeating the public, the majority of the people. And, when the majority of the public lose to your false political majority, just what kind of government do we have? It's an illegitimate government whose power is cheap and thinly procedural at best.

What is a government that governs without the consent of its people? I don't know but I know we've had plenty of them. One thing it's not, it's not a liberal democracy. It's something else and that may vary depending on the whim of the ruler of the day.

That ruler, not leader but ruler, may be benevolent. That ruler may not be. Democracy becomes a matter of whim and that can ebb and flow markedly even during one term of power. We wind up with rulers, some less authoritarian, some much more. And that's the back door where special interests always insinuate themselves between the public and those elected to serve them. And, when that happens, the real losers from the election are the people. Somebody wins. The prevailing party and the special interests, their patrons. Somebody loses. The people, the nation.

That's why Canada needs electoral reform. We're no longer a two-party system which has come to guarantee that an election spells defeat for the majority of our people. That's obscene.

An election should never become a defeat for our people. Why do we continue to tolerate that?

Trudeau promised electoral reform. He got elected on that promise. He reneged. Ditch him.

Fareed Zakaria's Eulogy for Liberal Democracy In America

Fareed Zakaria takes to the pages of the Washington Post to lament the passing of liberal democracy - and liberty - in his adopted homeland, the United States.

Two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs that described an unusual and worrying trend: the rise of illiberal democracy. Around the world, dictators were being deposed and elections were proliferating. But in many of the places where ballots were being counted, the rule of law, respect for minorities, freedom of the press and other such traditions were being ignored or abused. Today, I worry that we might be watching the rise of illiberal democracy in the United States — something that should concern anyone, Republican or Democrat, Donald Trump supporter or critic.

What we think of as democracy in the modern world is really the fusing of two different traditions. One is, of course, public participation in selecting leaders. But there is a much older tradition in Western politics that, since the Magna Carta in 1215, has centered on the rights of individuals — against arbitrary arrest, religious conversion, censorship of thought. These individual freedoms (of speech, belief, property ownership and dissent) were eventually protected, not just from the abuse of a tyrant but also from democratic majorities. The Bill of Rights, after all, is a list of things that majorities cannot do. 

In the West, these two traditions — liberty and law on the one hand, and popular participation on the other — became intertwined, creating what we call liberal democracy. It was noticeable when I wrote the essay, and even clearer now, that in a number of countries — including Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Iraq and the Philippines — the two strands have come apart. Democracy persists (in many cases), but liberty is under siege. In these countries, the rich and varied inner stuffing of liberal democracy is vanishing, leaving just the outer, democratic shell.

What stunned me as this process unfolded was that laws and rules did little to stop this descent. Many countries had adopted fine constitutions, put in place elaborate checks and balances, and followed best practices from the advanced world. But in the end, liberal democracy was eroded anyway. It turns out that what sustains democracy is not simply legal safeguards and rules, but norms and practices — democratic behavior. This culture of liberal democracy is waning in the United States today.

...we are now getting to see what American democracy looks like without any real buffers in the way of sheer populism and demagoguery. The parties have collapsed, Congress has caved, professional groups are largely toothless, the media have been rendered irrelevant. When I wrote a book about “illiberal democracy” in 2003, I noted that in polls, Americans showed greatest respect for the three most undemocratic institutions in the country: the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve and the armed forces. Today, the first two have lost much of their luster, and only the latter remains broadly admired.

What we are left with today is an open, meritocratic, competitive society in which everyone is an entrepreneur, from a congressman to an accountant, always hustling for personal advantage. But who and what remain to nourish and preserve the common good, civic life and liberal democracy?