Imagine a World Where Every Leader Was a Variation of Donald Trump

Donald Trump likes to pretend he's shaking everything up. In fact he's tearing everything down and what he can't tear down his instinct is to bog it down. You could say that he's the first poster boy for the Age of Entropy.

Yesterday I reviewed an article by political scientist and historian R.L. Schweller published in the June, 2014 volume of Foreign Affairs.

International politics is transforming from a system anchored in predictable, and relatively constant, principles to a system that is, if not inherently unknowable, far more erratic, unsettled, and devoid of behavioral regularities. In terms of geopolitics, we have moved from an age of order to an age of entropy.

...How did we get here? The shift began in the twentieth century, with the advent of nuclear weapons and the spread of economic globalization, which together have made war among the great powers unthinkable. ...The absence of cataclysmic wars among great powers has obviously been a great boon. But it has also come at a real cost.

In their absence [wars of  major power ascension], we no longer have a force of “creative destruction” capable of resetting the world. And just as seas become foul without the blowing of the winds, prolonged peace allows inertia and decay to set in.

Too much peace. Too little war. Mutually assured destruction. Neoliberalism. Stagnation. Failure of the world order. Chaos. In this Age of Entropy, Schweller thinks Trump is all America needs. Many would disagree.

Merkel, Macron, Trudeau and Abe are trying to bolster the international order but they've been virtually powerless to arrest the decline of liberal democracy and the rise of authoritarianism - Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Austria and even America. It seems chaos is indeed overtaking the world order. Authoritarianism has not only taken hold in these countries, it is a rising force in most others - Germany, France, the Netherlands, Britain and, yes, even our own Canada.

The longer leaders like Trudeau obsessively cling to globalism, the greater the appeal of authoritarian voices. People lose faith in their central governments as being under the sway of corporate interests and not in service to the public interest. If that was a crime you could convict every prime minister going back all the way to and including Mulroney. Democracy stagnated with the adoption of the neoliberal model and now democracy has succumbed to "inertia and decay."

As long as Trudeau's focus is on expanding trade and perpetual, exponential growth in the GDP he cannot focus on what ails us. He needs to be putting all his efforts into restoration of progressive democracy and there's an enormous amount of work that needs to be done in a shrinking window of opportunity. We have seen how other countries have succumbed or are at the cusp of illiberal democracy and worse. Doug Ford's victory yesterday is a wake up call. The election of Stephen Harper was a wake up call. Yet we sail into this becalmed, stagnant and foul sea and pretend nothing is wrong.

What We Need Now - Another Square Deal

Nothing would please me more than the implementation of an entirely conservative policy platform.   The conservative was US President Theodore Roosevelt.   The policy platform was Roosevelt's "Square Deal."

Roosevelt's policy focused on environmental conservation, reining in corporate excesses and basic consumer protection.  Bear in mind that what follows was said in 1910, a long century ago:

...the man to whom we owe most is, of course, Lincoln. Part of our debt to him is because he forecast our present struggle and saw the way out. He said:


"I hold that while man exists it is his duty to improve not only his own condition, but to assist in ameliorating mankind."

And again:

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

...In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next. 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. At every stage, and under all circumstances, the essence of the struggle is to equalize opportunity, destroy privilege, and give to the life and citizenship of every individual the highest possible value both to himself and to the commonwealth. 

...our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics. That is one of our tasks to-day. Every special interest is entitled to justice-full, fair, and complete-and, now, mind you, if there were any attempt by mob-violence to plunder and work harm to the special interest, whatever it may be, that I most dislike, and the wealthy man, whomsoever he may be, for whom I have the greatest contempt, I would fight for him, and you would if you were worth your salt. He should have justice. For every special interest is entitled to justice, but not one is entitled to a vote in Congress, to a voice on the bench, or to representation in any public office. The Constitution guarantees protection to property, and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation.

The true friend of property, the true conservative, is he who insists that property shall be the servant and not the master of the commonwealth; who insists that the creature of man’s making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being.

There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains. To put an end to it will be neither a short nor an easy task, but it can be done.

We must have complete and effective publicity of corporate affairs, so that the people may know beyond peradventure whether the corporations obey the law and whether their management entitles them to the confidence of the public. It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs. 

...The duty of Congress is to provide a method by which the interest of the whole people shall be all that receives consideration.

The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need to is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows. 


No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered-not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

The people of the United States suffer from periodical financial panics to a degree substantially unknown to the other nations, which approach us in financial strength. There is no reason why we should suffer what they escape. It is of profound importance that our financial system should be promptly investigated, and so thoroughly and effectively revised as to make it certain that hereafter our currency will no longer fail at critical times to meet our needs. 

...Conservation means development as much as it does protection. I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us. I ask nothing of the nation except that it so behave as each farmer here behaves with reference to his own children. That farmer is a poor creature who skins the land and leaves it worthless to his children. The farmer is a good farmer who, having enabled the land to support himself and to provide for the education of his children, leaves it to them a little better than he found it himself. I believe the same thing of a nation. 

...Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us, and training them into a better race to inhabit the land and pass it on. Conservation is a great moral issue, for it involves the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance of the nation. Let me add that the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals, and in this great work the national government must bear a most important part. 

Nothing is more true than that excess of every kind is followed by reaction; a fact which should be pondered by reformer and reactionary alike. We are face to face with new conceptions of the relations of property to human welfare, chiefly because certain advocates of the rights of property as against the rights of men have been pushing their claims too far. The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it. 

...One of the fundamental necessities in a representative government such as ours is to make certain that the men to whom the people delegate their power shall serve the people by whom they are elected, and not the special interests.

...In the last analysis, the most important elements in any man’s career must be the sum of those qualities which, in the aggregate, we speak of as character. If he has not got it, then no law that the wit of man can devise, no administration of the law by the boldest and strongest executive, will avail to help him. We must have the right kind of character-character that makes a man, first of all, a good man in the home, a good father, and a good husband-that makes a man a good neighbor. You must have that, and, then, in addition, you must have the kind of law and the kind of administration of the law which will give to those qualities in the private citizen the best possible chance for development. The prime problem of our nation is to get the right type of good citizenship, and, to get it, we must have progress, and our public men must be genuinely progressive. 

Every few years I like to return to Roosevelt's 1910 speech to recalibrate my political compass.  He speaks of a great political morality that has been abjectly trampled upon through the rise of corporatism over the past thirty or forty years.


Roosevelt warned his countrymen back then that direct or indirect corporate funding leads directly to the corruption of government.  That's a lesson every Canadian needs to grasp as our own country descends into Petro-statehood.

Teddy Roosevelt makes the point that progressivism is more than quaint notions.   It is a fundamental requirement of any sound society.  "Public men must be genuinely progressive."  In those words you'll find the perversion of anything remotely conservative in today's Conservative Party of Canada.  Harper has taken his radical movement so far beyond the political philosophies pronounced by Burke, Lincoln and Roosevelt that they would not consider it conservative.   It was Harper who demanded that "progressive" be expunged from the name of his party and from its twisted soul.

I am more deeply troubled when the question becomes whether the Liberal Party has itself drifted far to the right of Roosevelt's progressivism.  I believe it has.   That it was willing to annoint as its leader a man with the views of Michael Ignatieff cannot be overlooked.   The Liberal Party wonders how it came to fall from Sussex Drive to Stornoway to Motel 6 yet that ugly road was paved by its rejection of progressivism.

More than anyone else, the movers and shakers within the Liberal Party need to digest Roosevelt's speech and stop treating progressivism as a weakness or, worse, some disease no longer relevant in the 21st century.   Our country has fallen into the throes of corporatism - there's the disease that plagues our people.  We're lucky in that it's not yet terminal as it has become within our neighbour and major trading partner.   We can - and must - bring it to heel - through reining in corporate power, putting corporations into service of the public, strong environmental regulation and, above all else, sharply reversing the wealth gap between rich and poor.  We need a Square Deal.

If We Don't Get Progressive Leadership, Then What?

You can't say we haven't been warned - again and again and again.   Forces of instability are setting in around the world.  You name it.   Everything from deforestation; desertification; air/land/water contamination; resource depletion and exhaustion, particularly the freshwater crisis; energy insecurity; severe weather events of increasing frequency and intensity; cyclical droughts and floods, particularly in the world's key agricultural states; species extinctions and migration, especially fisheries collapse; pest and disease migration; sea level rise and ocean acidification; several really active arms races; seismic shifts in world power balances; nuclear proliferation and various security threats including terrorism; overpopulation and population migration due to conflict and climate change.  Did I leave anything out?   Oh yeah, global warming. These threats are real.  Many of them are visible from space.

They might be visible from space but they're seemingly invisible to our all too indifferent elected representatives of every party in the House of Commons, perhaps save one ineffective but well-intentioned lady.

If there was ever anything to legislatively chew on, this is it - a cornucopia of challenges begging for responses but Ottawa - the Harper Cons, the Rae Libs and the Layton Dippers repose in self-serving silence.  Daily they expose themselves as little people utterly incapable of rising to great challenges.  They're a collective of duds.

No one can expect any of them to solve these problems.   Most of them are insoluble.  That said, each of them demands a response of some nature whether it be an adaptation strategy or promotion of some international consensus.   Perhaps what's holding these guys back is the daunting prospect of acknowledging the common threads that run through these threats and challenges.  Those threads challenge our way of life, our global outlook, how we view the world and our place in it.  They invoke Einstein's warning that the solution to truly great problems cannot be solved with the same thinking that created them.

What we need so urgently now, today, is true and effective progressive leadership, something a good measure better than anything on the table today.  We need a philosophical intellect of the scale of Trudeau and, no, that's not his namesake who is far more Margaret than Pierre.  It takes that same sort of disciplined mastery of philosophy to identify the common threads in our net full of predicaments. It takes that same intellect and resolve to generate the leadership we will need to meet these challenges.

And if we don't get that leadership soon, then what?   Think Naomi Klein, think Disaster Capitalism, for what could be better suited to these rolling calamities?  The Cons are stuck with Harper and the NDP with Layton but the Libs have an opportunity to really scour the country for the sort of leadership we now so badly need.

My nominee?   Louise Arbour.

You are the Key to Reviving Progressivism

Fighting This Is Where It Begins

For three decades the Right has waged a campaign against progressivism, a highly effective campaign aided and abetted by plenty of money and a cooperative, corporate media.   This campaign was led in the United States by a second-rate, washed up movie actor turned president who sold them a pack of lies skilfully crafted to generate the greatest and undeserved transfer of political and economic power in American history.  It was a quiet, socialist takeover of America only it was socialism for the rich.  In its wake, progressivism was left bloodied and tattered.

America has been caught in this feverish delusion for three decades since Reagan ushered in his Age of Ruin.   During this time America grew prosperous, notionally at least.   Great wealth accrued to the rich.   America's workers became the most productive on earth.   Yet, for America's once vaunted Middle Class, increases in productivity and prosperity yielded wage stagnation.  Across the U.S. families saw both parents employed, often taking multiple jobs, just to make ends meet.   And, when that failed as it often did, they turned to the opiate of easy credit.

The Age of Ruin, like all radical movements, fostered its own mythology.  This included "supply side economics" and the "trickle down theory" combined under the apt moniker of "Voodoo Economics."  Americans, who once protested "no taxation without representation" were led to believe in representation without taxation as the shiny path to the future.    In the United States, wealth came to be equated with virtue (Lapham), constantly growing affluence the measure of liberty itself (Bacevich).   Throughout the country, at the federal, state, municipal, corporate and personal level, mounting debt became the instrument to buy easy time, to postpone harsh reality.   Notional wealth, debt-based, became the gruel of the working classes as real wealth flowed steadily upward to the richest of the rich.

Like an addict who loses his job and takes to living in back alleys, America shifted from being a robust production economy into a brittle consumption economy fueled by its ability to borrow against America's good credit of the past.   The Middle Class were able to replicate their past prosperity by supplementing their paycheques with money borrowed against notional, vast increases in the value of their homes.   They were so in thrall to these feverish delusions as to actually believe that the value of their homes could never decline, would always increase, would forever ensure their comfort and security.   It takes an awful lot of conditioning to come to the point where a person is willing to believe such things.

Just who conditioned the American people to embrace this lunacy?   The resolution lies in asking the question Cui Bono?  Who benefits from this crime?   Follow the money, follow the power.  It's a trail that leads to the barons of America's financialized economy, its corporatized media and a complicit government harnessed to their service.   This unholy marriage of corporate, media and government power is the very formula Benito Mussolini described as modern fascism.  It is fascism and it's existence is indisputable and evidenced daily in the constant disconnect between the country's top public servants, its Congress, and the public interest they are sworn but refuse to uphold.

Yet in this maelstrom lies the key to its dismemberment and the restoration of progressive democracy.  That begins with dismantling the corporate media, breaking down the cartel just as US progressives did to the railway barons through social, political and economic reforms.   The media as the fourth estate is vital to a functioning democracy but only when it is free to be the watchdog of government, not its lapdog.   The media only serves the public when it is free to present the broadest range of views necessary to support an informed electorate.   These purposes are defeated by two evils - concentration of ownership and media cross-ownership - both of which are well entrenched today.

Yes we need news networks.   Yes we need newspaper chains.  But we need many news networks, not few.   We need many newspaper chains, not few.  We need networks and chains that speak for the right and the progressive right, for the centre and the left of centre and the left.  Allow the public to become exposed to different points of view and discover that  at least most of them will be anchored in truth - honest but different.   Allow the public to become informed for that is the best way to make good their empowerment.

As we need many networks and chains we need many journalists and columnists.  The coporate media through concentration of ownership and cross-ownership is best served with fewer journalists.   Across America and Canada, newsrooms have been pared to the bone.   Fewer job opportunities means less freedom for outspoken voices.  It means more compliant reportage.  Yet, at the same time, it imbues the compliant voices with even greater power and usefulness to those with power to dispense.  We have seen this in Canada with journalists transformed into panderers and subsequently rewarded with high political office.  Power corrupts and it is as relentless in its corruptive power with advantaged journalists as with politicians.

So, surely, the first step in reinstating progressivism lies in dismantling the media cartels that serve us so poorly, imposing divestiture and establishing safeguards to prevent a corporate resurgence.   This is a power that lies within the hands of our political leadership yet which of them is championing the cause?   Harper?  You could hardly expect that from the main benefactor of the carefully sculpted status quo.  How about Ignatieff?   I've not heard it from him either but, then again, he is not exactly given to progressivism in any meaningful sense.   But Layton, surely him, no?   Not really.   The fact is that they're all sufficiently comfortable with or intimidated by the media cartel to call for its reformation.

It is probably unfair and unduly optimistic to expect the opening salvo for progressive restoration to come from these people.   Not one of them could muster the integrity and courage necessary for such a challenging and potentially dangerous step.   Not one of them is capable of putting the welfare of the Canadian people ahead of his personal political ambitions.  These are, after all, the Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill, a fairly good measure of what can be expected of them.

If anyone is going to salvage progressive democracy, it's going to be you.   You will have to do it just as I have done here and elsewhere - by writing about it, by talking about it, by insistently demanding it.   It won't happen quickly so don't burden yourself with unrealistic expectations.   It will take time and constant pressure.   Don't be discouraged.   Already you can see, even feel the inertia being overcome.  More and more people are beginning to discuss the scourge of corporatism spreading through our societies, infecting our institutions.  They're speaking out and they're being heard.  Join them, if only because it's the only way we're going to even the political keel.

Reinstating a free and responsive press is the key to undoing the chokehold corporatism has on our democracy.  We deserve better but we won't get it until we insist on it.

What US Progressives Dared to Dream Just Six Years Ago

American progressives, Democrat and Republican, really believed their country was on the brink of reformation prior to the 2004 elections.  They thought their nation could soon be put back on an even keel.  That was clear from an article published in the August, 2004 edition of Harper's, """  Liberalism Revived."

The article presented a forum discussion with progressives Ron D. Daniels, Eric Foner, Ralph Nader, Kevin Phillips, Frances Fox Piven and Harper's editor Lewis Lapham.   It's much too long to transcript in a blog entry but I thought you might appreciate a few excerpts from the progressive viewpoint of 2004.

Nader:  Robert Frost once defined a liberal as someone who has trouble arguing his own case.  If you look at the history of our country, the major justice movements have been colored liberal, and their opponents have been colored conservative.  Social Security, trade unions, slavery, and so on.  But the Democrats never talk about their victories.

Daniels:  Instead the word "  liberal' is a word that the Democrats distance themselves from.  They avoid it as if it were the plague.

Phillips:  ...Democrats have been anaesthetized by campain contributions.  And I should add that they have been anesthetized cheaply.  During the last twenty or twenty-five years, the Republicans have been able to take money for granted, but the democrats know they need to get it, and so they've become willing to soften their language and back away from their convictions.  Their neediness cripples them.  ...The Republicans have so many weaknesses that the Democrats can't exploit, because they have taken a second, smaller helping from the same trough.  What hands you a political opportunity in the United States is when something goes very wrong for the people who have power.  Today the Republicans are in trouble, and the main thing they have to keep them from imploding is that the Democrats are not much better.


Piven:  ...We should talk about reclaiming democracy by reducing corporate power and reducing inequality, especially the inequalities that affect working people and poor people.


Nader:  The impassioned political argument in American society today should be the one over the sovereignty of corporations and their entrenchment into every institutional system.  The giant multinational corporations set the parpameters and the paradigms.  They get into kids' minds at age two, or three, or four.  Every day another frontier falls to commerical intrusion.  And when that happens, we begin to lose our sovereignty.  We slowly lose the structure we have developed to defend the people, which is our national government.


Daniels:  We need to talk to one another and put together a methodical, relentless message.  When we go on the various talk shows, the people from the right are always better prepared.  We're there trying to improvise in the moment, because our think tanks haven't prepared us to put the right message on the table.


Phillips (on building a progressive majority):  Obviously you would need a party standing for something that these people don't see either party as standing for anymore.  The non-voters who could be swayed are, I would venture to say, people who today would say - rightly - that there is no longer a party of Roosevelt or Truman.

Foner:  ...some of the progressive issues mentioned here wouldn't attract anywhere near a majority of Americans today.  But we have to put those issues out on the table.  To insist on a living wage or to demand international justice is not going to win an electoral majority yet, but that doesn't mean it's any less important to stage the protests.  If you can change the nature of the public discourse, then the politics will follow.   ...You don't start off as if you're running for office and say, we can't get elected on these issues and therefore we had better compromise immediately.

...Specific crises, whether the slavery issue in the 1850s or the economic crisis of the Great Depression, shatter the boundaries of political dialogue, but there is always a long period of ideological gestation.  The abolitionists were not a very large group, but they had a tremendous impact in changing northern opinion about slavery, long before that change was reflected in politics.  So one of the things that progressives need to concentrate on, I think, is the formulation of a new set of perspectives, rather than simply worrying about the next election.

There was a great deal of hope in these voices back in 2004 but I wonder how differently they would see America today.  Their message, however, even if no longer palatable to 21st century Democrats in a "bought and paid for" Congress, remains relevant to today's Liberals who are often losing the same battles for the very same reasons.  Progressivism is the beating heart of a strong democracy.  It's time the Liberals reminded themselves of that.

Fighting Back Against the Right

The Right doesn't have a monopoly on values, so why do progressives allow them to pretend they do?  It's a phenomenon that took hold in the United States but as The Guardian's George Monbiot laments, it has spread even to his own Britain:

"...So here we are, forming an orderly queue at the slaughterhouse gate. The punishment of the poor for the errors of the rich, the abandonment of universalism, the dismantling of the shelter the state provides: apart from a few small protests, none of this has yet brought us out fighting.

The acceptance of policies that counteract our interests is the pervasive mystery of the 21st century. In the US blue-collar workers angrily demand that they be left without healthcare, and insist that millionaires pay less tax. In the UK we appear ready to abandon the social progress for which our ancestors risked their lives with barely a mutter of protest. What has happened to us?

It's a subject examined by Paul Krugman in the New York Times in which he exposes conservative "values" as often buoyed up by a tissue of lies.   One of these is that the Obama administration has recklessly plunged America into a death spiral of debt on stimulus programmes and Wall Street bailouts (actually initiated by Bush).

 ""...The answer to the second question — why there’s a widespread perception that government spending has surged, when it hasn’t — is that there has been a disinformation campaign from the right, based on the usual combination of fact-free assertions and cooked numbers. And this campaign has been effective in part because the Obama administration hasn’t offered an effective reply.
  Back to Monbiot who says the answer to why so many voters embrace supposed values contrary to their own interests may lie in a report released by the WWF:

"...Common Cause, written by Tom Crompton of the environment group WWF, examines a series of fascinating recent advances in the field of psychology. It offers, I believe, a remedy to the blight that now afflicts every good cause from welfare to climate change.Progressives, he shows, have been suckers for a myth of human cognition he labels the enlightenment model. This holds that people make rational decisions by assessing facts. All that has to be done to persuade people is to lay out the data: they will then use it to decide which options best support their interests and desires.

A host of psychological experiments demonstrate that it doesn't work like this. Instead of performing a rational cost-benefit analysis, we accept information that confirms our identity and values, and reject information that conflicts with them. We mould our thinking around our social identity, protecting it from serious challenge. Confronting people with inconvenient facts is likely only to harden their resistance to change.


...Our social identity is shaped by values that psychologists classify as extrinsic or intrinsic. Extrinsic values concern status and self-advancement. People with a strong set of extrinsic values fixate on how others see them. They cherish financial success, image and fame. Intrinsic values concern relationships with friends, family and community, and self-acceptance. Those who have a strong set of intrinsic values are not dependent on praise or rewards from other people. They have beliefs that transcend their self-interest.

...By changing our perception of what is normal and acceptable, politics alters our minds as much as our circumstances. Free, universal healthcare, for example, tends to reinforce intrinsic values. Shutting the poor out of it normalises inequality, reinforcing extrinsic values. The rightward shift that began with Thatcher and persisted under Blair and Brown, whose governments emphasised the virtues of competition, the market and financial success, has changed our values. The British Social Attitudes survey shows a sharp fall over this period in public support for policies that redistribute wealth and opportunity.

 Common Cause proposes a simple remedy: that we stop seeking to bury our values and instead explain and champion them. Progressive campaigners, it suggests, should help to foster an understanding of the psychology that informs political change and show how it has been manipulated. They should also come together to challenge forces – particularly the advertising industry – that make us insecure and selfish.

 People with strong intrinsic values must cease to be embarrassed by them. We should argue for the policies we want not on the grounds of expediency but on the grounds that they are empathetic and kind; and against others on the grounds that they are selfish and cruel. In asserting our values we become the change we want to see.

Bear in mind what is at stake in reviving progressivism in the West, including in Canada.  Our country, like the rest of the planet, is embarking on what will be a century of change and likely upheaval.   Tough decisions will need to be taken and they're going to necessitate, in some instances, limitations and sacrifice.   The Right will seek to cushion the impact of change, on themselves, by shifting as much of the burden as possible onto others.   The rise of oligarchy in the United States is not happenstance, nor is the evolution of today's "bought and paid for" Congress.   Already the American people are being groomed to see entitlement programmes, programmes the blue and white collar classes have paid into their entire working lives, as parasitic and "socialist" (which, they're taught, is of itself intrinsically evil).   American democracy is being destroyed by influence peddling while the thieves convince the voting public to blame progressivism.  Brilliant, diabolical but brilliant.

Has the Liberal Party Become a Desert for Progressives?

Have progressive Liberals become about as welcome in their party as Dennis Kucinich is to the Democrats? No matter how solid their arguments, no matter how urgent their pleas, within the Liberal Party no one is listening.

There's hardly anything even remotely progressive about Michael Ignatieff and his ideas. I guess "ideas" is the appropriate word because it would be exaggeration bordering on hyperbole to call them vision.

From the Tar Sands to a militarized foreign policy devoid of balance and nuance to an obvious indifference to the environment to being Harper's water boy in Parliament, I can't think of one compelling reason why any progressive would support the IgLibs, henceforth to be referred to as the Conservative-Lite Party of Canada (CLPC).

I know from what others have told me that a lot of us feel caught in a political limbo, no longer willing to back the CLPC but having no appetite for the doctrinaire NDP either. Maybe what we need is a new party, one that merges what once was the Liberal's centre-left with open-minded, moderate Dippers. Dedicated IgLibs will doubtless scream "heretic" and "traitor." They'll cast accusations of dissenters "only helping Harper". Their argument, however, is a tired rehash of the "lesser of two evils" and I'm not up for playing that game.

Sure a new party might be the kiss of death for the CLPC but so what? They've been virtually comatose on every major issue ever since Ignatieff took the reins. They throw down the gauntlet and then run from the fight, over and over and over again. They throw up useless bromides and platitudes to conceal the greasy footprints of their vote pandering.

Both the NDP and the LPC have a touch of radicalism, the Dippers on the far left and the LPC on the conservative right and I figure that those elements are holding both of them back. Real political strength lies in the centre which happens to be where Canada has found most of its greatest leaders. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Ditch the far left. Ditch the far right. Build a new entity in the centre/centre-left, the natural home of progressives. Why do names like Axworthy and Romanow keep flooding into my mind?

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I know, I know. It was only a couple of days ago that I dismissed the idea of a political merger of the NDP and Liberals. But what I'm talking about isn't just a merger. It's a house cleaning by both, shedding of skins. Let the NDP continue as the home of the far left. Let the LPC sail on as the CLPC until it reaches the very edge of the earth. He may be an abomination but Stephen Harper has done one good thing - he's laid out a roadmap that could be followed to create a united progressive party.

The Rebirth of Populism

Rachel Maddow and Bill Maher and 100,000 Dubliners may just be right. We may be about to witness the restoration of populism.

The Dubliners turned out in an angry protest over inadequacies in their government's stimulus initiative. The comments reported in The Guardian and other papers suggested a depth of anger that won't be going away soon, the fuel to drive change.

Give white and blue-collar Americans a chance to let the reality of what's hit them sink in and they too might come to see the economic elite for what they have wrought on working Americans. Big Business, Big Capital has left the United States in tatters and it was all through a toxic brew of greed and incompetence.

The factories of wealth raked in trillions of dollars through cannibalizing America's industrial base and flooding world markets with bad paper. Right wing news organizations ran interference for them, distracting the working classes with xenophobic anger and fears of terrorism. What happens if blue and white-collar Americans discover that they were indeed terrorized - from within? What fate awaits the oligarchs if the American people throw off their blankets of fear?

I'd bet that the populist revolution in the United States will break out when their government moves to "reform" Social Security. Having saddled working America with two, likely three-trillion dollars in debt on stimulus spending and bailing out Wall Street and American banks, it's going to take a lot of brass to stare down those workers and tell them the government can't afford to honour its Social Security promise to them.

That pitch falls apart as soon as someone asks "why?" The only reason why is that the federal government has, for decades, stolen the money working Americans entrusted to it for their retirement. It simply appropriated each year's Social Security surplus, money that was supposed to be safely invested to grow the fund necessary for the wave of Baby Boomer retirees. It siphoned off much of that surplus and wrote IOUs in exchange. Remember Bush talking about a file cabinet full of worthless IOUs?

What if working class America stomped its collective foot and demanded "government of the people, by the people and for the people," the deal enshrined in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address? My, my, my - the possibilities are endless.

Americans have a rich history of populism marked by the rise of the Progressives in the late 1800s through the 1920s. It was a democratic balancing, a movement to set right the excesses of the oligarchs, to reclaim political power for the public.

Keeping Joe Lunchpail in line hasn't been easy but it's been accomplished by feeding him the lie that progressivism = liberalism = socialism = communism = godless political slavery. It's a powerful lie but a lie nonetheless. It's a lie that's going to become harder to sustain. Once working Americans come to see it as a lie and realize how it's been used against them it must just spark a counter-offensive in the class war that's been quietly waged on working America going back to the Reagan years.

Has The Ground Shifted Beneath Us?

What the cynics fail to understand is that

the ground has shifted beneath them

In that one line, Barack Obama today rebuked, denounced, rejected and consigned to the trash the ideology spawned by Ronald Reagan that grew, under Bush/Cheney, to very nearly choke to death American democracy itself.

When I heard Obama state those words I said to myself "it's about time" before wondering if, indeed, the ground hasn't finally shifted beneath all of us.

I hope and believe that the Obama presidency will usher in a new era restoring America's progressive legacy. That Obama is a progressive is beyond doubt.

But what of Canada's rich, progressive tradition? It's been taking a beating the past couple of years but, surely, there is no better time to restore progressive democracy to Canada than now. Has the ground shifted beneath us too?

I don't expect to hear anything progressive from Stephen Harper. He's too tightly invested in the failed ideology of those who were helicoptered out of Washington today.

What of the Liberal Party of Canada? Liberals past would have been very comfortable hearing Obama's inaugural address. They would have heard in it many of their own, core beliefs.

Wouldn't it be great if today's Liberal leadership revealed a real understanding and appreciation of our great progressive tradition? How encouraging it would be if, instead of drawing itself closer to Harper on the right, the Liberal leadership broke from that and declared that the ground has shifted beneath us too, that we were taking Canada back to the centre where this nation belongs.

Those who might dismiss this as so much leftwing sentimentality weren't listening to what Obama was saying. He embraces progressive democracy because he knows that, with the enormous challenges that are already here and the even greater challenges that are coming, it is the only way for his nation, any nation, to meet them.