Manifesto for the Next Opposition
There were a considerable number of people in the progressive blogs, people I respect like Dammit Janet, who counselled strategic voting over the past month. I did not. Many of them are understandably upset at the results. Many of them are blaming people like me, who said to go ahead and vote your conscience and damn the consequences. And I’m going to defend my choice here, but my main focus is on how to move ahead. Move ahead together, I mean. We need each other now more than ever.
But the main thing is to figure out where to go from here.
Strategic Voting Wasn’t the Issue
The main problem, and the main thing to think about going forward, is that we didn’t get into this mess through a lack of strategic voting. We lost this election 15 years ago, when the right-wing think tanks began to take over public debate and the corporate media began to centralize. Over 90% of the major print media explicitly sided with the Conservatives in this campaign. More to the point, they also explicitly sided against the NDP. The slew of ludicrous stories that came out over the past week prove that the corporate media will say anything, do anything, to discredit a left-wing party on the rise, even one that seriously compromised on its original leftist roots and never really stood a chance of forming its own government.
That’s important, because the Liberals are a right of centre party under its current leadership, have been right of centre more often than not since the Trudeau years, and there is no way in hell they would accept second place in an NDP-led coalition. There is no way their wealthy backers or their internal right wing would let them. The majority of Canadians oppose Harper, and the majority of Canadians would support an NDP-Liberal coalition. But the NDP and the Liberals didn’t run as a coalition. So the fault lies with them. As someone who did not “vote strategically,” I will not apologize or accept responsibility for not choosing an option that was never genuinely presented to me in the first place.
And if the present-day Liberals recovered (which they would have), they would have eventually pushed away the NDP and gone straight back to the mold originally imagined by Martin and Ignatieff, a right-of-centre pro-business party with basically the same goals as the Conservatives but with a little bit more tact and finesse, and a few less jackboots and clubs. I wouldn’t mind some respect for the rule of law in the short term. But in the long term, we’d be in just as serious trouble. Hopefully the Liberals will take advantage of this opportunity to clear away their top-heavy deadweight and get serious about representing Canada again. Otherwise they really are done. And so are the rest of us.
Why We Lost the Election
There are five things you can blame for this outcome. First, the NDP and Liberal leadership put their own interests ahead of those of the nation. We now have a brief period in which we can demand a better showing from the opposition in this country. This country has had a left-wing party, a centrist party, and a right-wing party competing for space for most of the past 90 years now. Historically there have been only a few glitches (read: Brian Mulroney) in making sure the right-wing party is kept firmly under wraps until the present. That can be chalked up entirely to the collapse of leadership in the Liberal Party in 2004, and the rightward shift of the NDP to take advantage of that fact. If Jack Layton had been the leader of the Liberal Party, he would be Prime Minister right now. If the Liberals can dig deep enough into their corrupted, exhausted core and find someone with that level of charisma and rapport with the Canadian people, they can be the government again. It’s very simple.
Second, around 25%-30% of registered Canadian voters apparently feel that our country should not have universal healthcare, should not have a government that has at least enough ethical strength not to attempt to plant false stories in the press, should not have the rule of law, should not have fair and free elections, should not have a public broadcaster, should not have public pensions, should not have a government willing to hand over billions of dollars in tax credits to its rich corporate friends while ordinary Canadians are in dire need, and should not do anything at all about the greatest threat that faces our generation, climate change. We now have four years to begin convincing those people that they are mistaken.
Third, it is fiendishly difficult to challenge a government in power when it is supported and endorsed by 90% of the media. The reasons for the media’s complacence vary: rich corporate owners favour low-tax Conservative governments, and lazy journalists favour cheap and easy stories based on press releases and innuendo rather than genuine but time-consuming investigative journalism. But the polls show conclusively that 90% of the media only speak for about one-quarter of Canadians. That’s a problem, and it’s a problem that we can do something about. I’m going to return to that in a moment.
Fourth, Harper was elected because around 40% of adult Canadians don’t care enough about the current fragile state of our country to even vote in elections. That’s an enormous number. If Harper had won them over, he could have legitimately claimed a majority government, instead of his current mandate from a small minority of Canadians. If Ignatieff or Layton had won them over, then we would not have needed any talk about strategic voting. It would have been a progressive landslide and the Tories would have been blown off the electoral map. That’s literally how wide the range of options would be if someone could figure out how to get people to vote. Of course, they’d probably be just as mixed in their preferences as the actual voters were — I’m using these scenarios to illustrate just how comparatively large non-democratic Canada has now become.
Still, there is hope. 60% of Canadians who voted, voted against Harper. Two-thirds of Canadians consider themselves broadly progressive, not conservatives. The fifth reason that Harper now has power is because we live with a useless, decrepit, obselete First Past the Post system that not only wasn’t designed for a multiparty system, but wasn’t designed for a political party-based system in the first place. You can have bland faceless MP-spokesmen and a proportional representation system, or you can have actual individual politicians representing their specific ridings in a First Past the Post system. But you can’t mix and match these things — you can’t now, and you couldn’t in the 1990s, when Jean Chretien was the one benefiting from it either. We need electoral reform. Now.
The Need for Credible New Media
I can’t do much about the above at the moment, but I do want to return to the third problem. We’re reaching a point where the mainstream corporate media is so unvaryingly compromised and corrupt that it is mostly useless. They opposed the NDP by reflex, they endorsed the Conservatives because they were pro-business, and we can count on them to do the same for the next four years. The majority of people in this country are not politically active outside of election campaigns and are mostly trusting of the media, mostly because there are no trustworthy alternatives and because finding those alternatives would take effort.
Is it ridiculous for the blogosphere to try to advance a credible alternative? In some ways, absolutely. The number of screaming partisans with blogs is exponentially greater than the number of genuine party insiders in the corridors of power in Ottawa. The general level of quality of the discussion on the Internet is low. But to be frank, it is also genuinely diverse right now, whereas the print media, the television media, and the talk radio sectors in this country are not diverse at all. For the moment the Internet is considerably more democratic than the rest of the media. That gives us some room to move, and about the only good thing about a majority is that we can say for certain we have time to work with. There will be at least one more election in Canada — contrary to what some scared people are saying, there will probably be many more. This is good, because the core Harper team is so demonstrably, inexplicably corrupt and incompetent (batting one for three against the weakest Liberal leaders in generations) that there is a very real chance this party will spectacularly self-destruct in the future, much like the Tories did in 1993 and in 1935. We’ve got until that happens to change the political climate of this country so that whoever replaces him is forced to make real reforms, not just mouth platitudes and turn his back on the electorate like, say, Barack Obama.
I don’t want to understate the magnitude of the problem. It’s very serious. The media are openly arrayed in favour of Conservative government because it is pro-business and because it has mastered the art of simple, misleading, headline-driven stories. The polling system makes coordination vital, to an extent that progressive and centrist Canadians are going to have extreme difficulty. And we’re running out of time, probably no matter what Canada does. Some time within the next century, we’re going to move from global abundance to global shortage on multiple fronts — oil, fresh water, fertile topsoil, copper, lithium, helium, platinum, phosphates… And then there’s climate change, of course. To the south, democratic institutions are crumbling even more rapidly than they are here, and it will be the 2020s before any responsible action is taken — unless by then they’ve rotted away entirely, in which case nobody will be left with both the power and the understanding to act at all. We’re in the last stages of a decades-long crisis, and right now we’re losing badly. But if we pass the point of peak resource availability without restructuring our economy to cope with the new realities, our species is toast. There won’t always be a new invention coming along to save us.
But I also think it would be wrong to underestimate the tools we have available to us. Right now it is a trivial matter for me or another blogger to build a site that could be read by every politically conscious Canadian on a regular basis. Not that every politically conscious Canadian would want to, of course. But it could be done. When it comes to information and communication, the technical disparity between elites and dissidents is now lower than it has been in literally thousands of years. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the failed revolutions in Iran, Bahrain, and several other countries, are a testament to this. And we don’t have to worry about the army shooting at us, like they did. The problem we have is coordinating our efforts and getting people to notice. Those are big problems, but not as big as the problem the Internet solved for us in the first place.
Internet freedom is going to change, too, as the result of the death of Internet neutrality. But we have an unprecedented window, and while it is closing, for the moment it’s still open. And I continue to believe that a large majority of Canadians do care about democracy, about healthcare, about the health of the planet, even if they’ve been temporarily dazzled by tax breaks and bamboozled by scaremongering about separatist coalitions. I have to believe that. There is no other choice. I refuse to believe that this country has raised multiple generations who are ignorant enough, selfish enough, and narrow-minded enough (not to mention in brazen denial enough) to genuinely support the government they just voted for.
How do we go about seizing this opportunity? Haven’t a clue. But we have four years to find out, and now’s a good time to start.
Tweet
Em Larsson
“And we don’t have to worry about the army shooting at us” On the other hand, let us not forget G20. I think this little phrase may be a tad optimistic.
Sixth Estate
I haven’t forgotten the G20. There will be more occasions like that. And the police will continue to push the envelope a little further on each occasion, just as they’ve been doing for years.
But frankly what we’re facing from the police is still nothing like what the protest movements in the Middle East have had to face. That’s worth remembering.
ktron
60% of Canadians who voted, voted against this outcome yet a minority has potentially seized control of the country, a minority that displays stunning levels of willful ignorance in all fields of human knowledge, a minority motivated by a dogmatic mix of fear and spite (a mix of ironically biblical proportions) a minority born in the fetid atmosphere of party politics, and raised to despise the freedom of people who may not agree with them.
Numerous novelists and thinkers, many Canadians among them, have detailed the potential pitfalls of bad politics. While neither may be politically correct in any current camp, the two writers who can shed the brightest lights quickly on our current situation are Orwell and Huxley: Orwell laid out how the destruction of language leads to the downfall of true human intelligence, and Huxley illustrated how easily mere opportunity of choice is mistaken for true freedom.
Freedom dies in an atmosphere of ignorance, and ignorance has been raised to almost unassailable strength by the mass media’s destruction of language. But the fault doesn’t live only with mass media, it lives with each and every one of us, particularly if we remain passive when confronted by our own ignorance, or the ignorance we may find among friends, relatives, neighbours, or people in the next seat on the bus. Combatting ignorance requires resourceful determination and perseverance but most importantly it requires the ability to consider many, many different ideas. The idea of democracy, generally considered to be the most manageable approach to freedom, is first and foremost an idea of governance, yet we consistently frame all of our ideas of democracy in terms of party politics. In light of yesterdays results perhaps the most pressing idea we now need to consider is whether there is any sane reason to allow party politics to continue to dominate governance – this may be an idea that is unusual enough to serve as the basis for a discussion capable of driving the development of your proposed credible new media.
Uncommoner
I can’t fault you on any one of your points.
We’ve entered a dark time for Canada. I don’t have a lot of hope right now, and absolutely no faith in the average voter/non-voter.
How can you fight back against an avalanche of money and ink?
Sixth Estate
ktron — The one good thing is that, on the whole, the most dedicated fearmongering campaign in Canadian history was only able to sway the opinions of a few percent of voters. 60% didn’t buy it in 2006 and didn’t buy it in 2011, either. Canada is a progressive country. Most of the Conservative voters, for that matter, support programs that Harper personally opposes, like public healthcare. Either proportional representation or a unified progressive front could eliminate the Reform Party forever. Our task now is to make sure that front survives the next four years and makes a better showing next time.
Uncommoner — It’s easy to fight back. It’s harder to win, but the first steps in this resistance are easy ones. We need to work hard from day one, but I still believe we can do this. Canada is still worth fighting for.
fern hill
This is a good read. I had a giggle at ‘Haven’t a clue’. So, thanks for that on this literally and figuratively dark day.
I haven’t a clue either, but I do know that we who value democracy have to work together. And that includes people on the right. I lurk at Free Dominion and one of its owners, Connie Fournier, are FB friends. It started sort of jokily but we find that we agree on many issues. For the wrong reasons, of course, but still a place to start. Connie was against prorogation and joined CAPP. Issues of transparency and accountability drive them nuts too. And they are really strong on net neutrality, again for the wrong reasons. . .
Many of the so-cons did sit this one out or voted fringe. Or said they did.
Part of my enthusiasm for strategic voting was based on the power and reach of the Internet and social media. But I misjudged people’s partisanship.I really thought that the evil of the Contempt Party was so manifest that people would gladly hold noses and vote them out. My bad.
So, yeah. I’m in. When we figure out what we’re doing.
Sixth Estate
Thanks fern. Good to know I’m not alone.
Connie Fournier
I don’t agree with every point that you’ve made in this article, but I agree with a lot of them.
We HAVE TO work together if we are going to protect our freedom of speech on the internet. Harper has promised to pass the Investigative Powers for the 21st Century Act within 100 days. We don’t have the political power to stop him, but I think if we work together we could put a lot of public pressure on him.
So, I’m in, too. If you’ll have me.
Sixth Estate
The more, the merrier.
Nadine Lumley
Now it’s time for Canada’s Uncut Movement
http://politicsrespun.org/2011/03/why-you-dont-know-about-the-uncut-movement/?utm_source=wordtwit
http://www.thenation.com/article/158282/how-build-progressive-tea-party
http://canadauncut.net/
http://www.facebook.com/canadauncut
Twitter: #CanadaUncut
♥
Poster
Superb analysis. Our Westminister system and majoritarianism goes together so well.
ktron
Indeed the 60% of voters, the majority of voters as it were, who have effectively been disenfranchised should be the focal point, but one of the best things about the Canadian scene is diversity and diversity means that choosing a single focal point is challenging. That challenge is even tougher given the incessant reliance on knee-jerk ideology right across the political spectrum. Big media sets the tone by painting politics in sports colours or war colours, with metaphors that invariably imply yes/no us/them dichotomies that can only be sustained in minds full of fears, minds programmed through relentless exposure to authoritarian mantras and memes. These memes seem to constantly displace thoughts of potentially destroying things they support (public healthcare?) in order to calm whichever fear is currently being stoked.
With our existing fearful mindset, Proportional Representation is probably the most democratic way to go. But the fear-mongers are in control and they’ve already had significant success in programming the falsehood that “PR is too complicated for the public to understand”. Through some weird anomaly of linguistic brain-chemistry the meme of “too complicated for the public” seems to be received by many people as a tonic rather than a goad, so the defeat of electoral reform was easy in both British Columbia and Ontario. It will fall to similar defeat federally unless we make significant gains in public education.
Canadian schools have never provided instruction in how Democracy works – effectively how laws are created in Canada – and that is a major problem: some schools give token nods toward how a Parliament works, some have courses in “law” but those courses are neither effective nor are they core requirements. The solution to that problem would be convincing every Canadian to really grapple with the ideas and concepts that are the basis of Democracy until they understand them, and after that, if they don’t like the ideas of Democracy, they are free to go to any number of countries in the world who don’t practice it – perhaps we should even subsidize the fare. The obvious challenges for that solution lie in creating the opportunities and tools to perform that education, but before we can even tackle those challenges there is the fundamental problem that we have no definition of Democracy. We have gone some ways toward defining Canadian Democracy by creating the Charter and trying to repatriate the Constitution, but most Canadians have no idea about the contents and implications of either of these, let alone how they are created, modified, or enforced. Even to many of those who are democratically active, or at least vote, the basic laws/structures of Canadian society remain a matter of faith or belief rather than knowledge, and we know what happens when faith or belief supersede knowledge.
offroad artist
Yes. Probably not a coincidence that you wrote exactly what I wrote yesterday and I presume neither of us saw the other’s post.
A more reliable, more honest journalism is needed. In addition to that , effective counterbalances need to be found for the growing herds of right-leaning or flat out right-hype media that are out there.
Where I mention Charles Leblanc on my post today, it isn’t primarily with tongue in cheek – but if he is on to something, I don’t know what it is. Still, I can’t help but feel there is a kernel of magic in what he does.
As you say, there is a window open at present. This could be slammed shut pretty easily.
karen
I’m in too. I’m a long time lurker, active in my community, but mostly I think you and various others in blogdom say this better than I could, and so I only comment occasionally, rather than blog myself. I guess that has to change. I have a child who has a wider circle of very committed activist friends, any of which I could see having been in Toronto for the G8. These are young people who are building the world, they are feeding the poor, they are putting experts and the interested together in areas like food security, recycling, anti-corporatism, collectivism. I want the world they envision, and I want more than anything to support them in their efforts and protect them from what I fear may happen in this country in the next five years. We built this mess somehow. I want to help fix it.
Sixth Estate
ktron — Excellent thoughts. I’ve been pondering the education problem for quite a while too. I’m not exactly sure how or when the K-12 system could interest people in the nitty gritty of politics, but the failure to give people a basic civics education when they’re teens almost certainly plays a role in reducing interest later on.
Artist — A coincidence, but my sentiments exactly. Although I do think we need stronger evidence than the Conservative endorsement racket, and I’m working on something there which I’ll publish in a few days.
Karen — Thanks for commenting! I’m glad to see so many messages of support and I look forward to what we can do together to hold this government accountable and build towards something better in 2015.
ktron
To attain electoral reform it will be a necessary to engage people from across the entire political spectrum, we’re kidding ourselves if we think that the entire 60% who didn’t vote for The Harper Government will automatically support electoral reform. There will be a goodly number of hard core party-supporters who for whatever reason think that “this is the time my gang wins” and therefore won’t support a change that might reduce the size of that win. So one question to consider in choosing a path forward may be whether it is possible to engage people in matters of governance (such as electoral reform) without dealing with “the knitty gritty of politics”. A big part of the engagement/knowledge problem is based in personalities and some personalities are very hard to engage in learning.
I don’t know if there is a typical left-wing personality but there has been interesting research done on the possibility of a personality that tends to the right:
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
Sixth Estate
You’re quite right, ktron. I think the BC experience is probably an informative one both on what to expect and what would be required.
I tend to be a bit hesitant about these personality-politics studies, if only because in my experience “left” and “right” don’t really apply cleanly to politics. For instance, a “right-wing” libertarian and a “right-wing” social conservative probably have extraordinarily different personalities. And what is a “right-wing” issue today wasn’t always that way. It used to be Liberals demanding free trade and deregulation and Conservatives pumping money into massive public and semi-public projects.
G Weatherwax
Thank you for an excellent post. I’ve been wanting to try to find some way of getting credible information and worry that there might not be much time to set up contacts.
I’ve watched as the msm actively campaigns for the CPC, but thought (mistakenly) that the CBC might be more balanced until just after the first prorogation when announcers started repeating the talking points and injecting “coup” and “undemocratic” into their comments on a coalition. Not quite as blatant then as the 7 am “news” this election day morning when Louise Elliott “reported” on S.H.’s last campaign day, playing the part of a speech warning of how the NDP would collapse our economy, and James Fitzimmons spoke of Duceppe talking of the lack of qualifications of the NDP candidates, & not even trying to cover by the merest mention of either M.I. or J.L. except for the attack parts I mentioned.
Like ktron, I’ve read Altemeyer’s piece but am still puzzled by some of the thought processes of the right. Like karen, I’ve been a lurker but have decided that must change. Earlier today & before I read this post I was wondering how long the window would be open and signed on to blogger to be able to make some connections before it closes.
offroad artist
Thanks for the reply. I meant ‘no coincidence’ in the sense that this media problem is so obvious, I’m surprised there weren’t more people on it . Conservatives own the media in more ways than one. Look forward to seeing your further work on this topic. Wish I would have thought of filing some of this stuff over the campaign. I saw some wild things in the Vancouver Sun, too, that I never thought to save.
The standard response is going to be someone will go through all the newspapers and “count” the articles pro and con the various parties and it will come out even, or slightly in the Liberal’s (!) favour.
Easy to see how that could be gamed. One of the most shocking examples I’ve seen was when the big Electrolux plant closing in Quebec was announced – how it was hidden in the Journal de Montreal. On the front page it had a little teaser where it said the jobs were going to Mexico (they’re actually going to Memphis) – see page 41. Surprise! no story on pg 41. On the online version it was virtually impossible to find as well. It’s on my blog.
Sixth Estate
Actually offroad, that “standard response” is very similar to a project I’m now preparing to do. The results should be interesting. I’ll have a longer post about it soon, but I try to maintain a relaxed daily schedule and I won’t be releasing it until it’s a slow day.
Unfortunately, in my opinion holding the media accountable has now become as important as holding politicians accountable.
ktron
You’re absolutely right to treat personality studies carefully, and it was foolishly hypocritical of me to use the left-right paradigm especially as I hold to being one of those people who’s heart leans to the left and wallet leans to the right. Altemeyer’s study is not really concerned with left and right except where they crop up in real world examples. The study is focused on Authoritarianism, which resides in every stripe of politics, and perhaps more problematically has taken a dominant hold in so-called journalism.
The paper deals with correlations between world-view and relation-to-power. It holds considerable relevance to the inability/unwillingness of the leaders and hard-core followers of the opposition parties to focus on real issues and unmask the fallacies that mass media has conditioned the Canadian public to accept as truths. Instead opposition leaders were focused on self-aggrandizement and protecting their fragile egos.
Assuming Mr. Harper finally decides to actually follow a law he created, it’s unlikely that four years is enough time to raise the consciousness of partisans or the general public to a level where they will challenge the daily inundation of misinformation and vigourously support electoral reform. But it is possible to break open and expose the cognitive dissonance that is formed by allowing authoritarianism to overrule the democratic process. Most people would get that. Once they get that, they may see that it is in everyone’s best interests to improve the system. As a conversation opening ploy can we try telling people we’re starting a “Coalition of the Willing” and see how much of the U.S. irony deficiency has leached honest sense out of Canadians too?
G Weatherwax – maybe we need to allow that the term “thought process” covers a lot of ground. For some it may mean many hours of thinking, reading, conversing, walking, researching, re-thinking and consideration, but for others it may be no more complicated than trying to block out the TV long enough to remember what dear old Dad spouted around the BBQ thirty-odd years ago.
offroad and Sixth – It would be most interesting if someone has the patience and resources to complete a “standard response” type project. Also it’s disgusting how often the media accepts and uses terminology that is designed to dumb down discussion so if such a study were able to include the number of times soundbytes are quoted or played without debunking, that would be extremely informative too, as would any effort to identify and track memes. To be genuinely useful it would need to track the bytes and memes of all parties. This would show both the effectiveness and the failures of the microwaved-frozen-haiku approach to political discussion.
Anyone tried discerning the trends toward truncated thinking/reportage that are encouraged by relying on Web 2.0?
Sixth Estate
ktron — Don’t be too hard on yourself. I remember there was a “liberals and conservatives have different brains” thing a couple months ago and I was interested in it then. It was only as I started reading about that study that I began to think about the problems applying it to real-world politics.
The project you’re discussing is large and would need academic resources behind it — for instance a PhD study. There is the McGill media studies group, but it’s taken Donner Foundation funding in the past and frankly I wouldn’t trust myself to interpret the results for that reason (since I’d love it if it agreed with my preconceptions but dismiss it if it didn’t). My own project is smaller-scale but I think at least starts to move us in the right direction.
But you bring up an extremely important second point there, too, which is that the media doesn’t just have biased reporting but, frankly, “dumb” reporting. There are a number of factors behind this, but I think one of the most important is the decline in journalism. The need to get stories out quickly, and the decline in funds available to do actual investigative work, means that stories tend to amount to little more than summaries of official statements, usually with a counter-statement from some other source to “balance” it out. And the media gets far too easily carried away with the “easy” stories which don’t require real work — endless discussion of polls, for instance, or all kinds of nonsense about “left” and “right” and “middle” as though you can govern the country by your position on a graph.
Web 2.0 — I think there might be. I’ve wanted to complain about Twitter in the past but wasn’t sure how to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t sound far more curmudgeonly than a 28-year-old has any right to sound. That said, yes, I think it is another step in the same process. It is effectively impossible to have serious conversations via Twitter.
ktron
The Media’s Role in a Dysfunctional Parliament
- Hugh Winsor C.M. Rideau Club, January 27, 2011
http://canadiansfordemocraticrenewalblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/medias-role-in-dysfunctional-parliament.html
Sixth Estate
That’s an excellent address and one I hadn’t read before (though I did have the privilege of meeting him several years ago). I agree with virtually everything in it.
That said, I think he may be a little over-optimistic about the media. He’s right that the media should be covering restrictions on scientists, committees, civil servants, and backbenchers as exactly what it is. In fact, I’ll go further and call it what it really is: authoritarian censorship. The problem is, I’m not sure to what degree the present media actually cares. During the election campaign the Globe & Mail actually praised Harper for censoring his subordinates, saying his “bullheadedness” was exactly what Harper needed. Instead of challenging the powerful, the media is cheerleading for authoritarianism.
JJ
Great post, lots to think about.
I have long maintained that the only way to effect real change is for all sides to drop their partisanship, forget about the phony left/right dichotomy and focus on those values we share. There’s strength in numbers and power in working together as citizens rather than “progressives” or “conservatives”. The last thing Harper or any other politician wants to see is people abandoning partisanship to work together. Divide & conquer has been used by governments to control their citizenry since the beginning of time, and nothing divides like partisanship.
The “scared people” you mention are a problem: I wonder if they know how great a favour they’re doing for the powers-that-be by keeping us divided & powerless with hysterical fearmongering.
Sixth Estate
A pleasure to hear from you, JJ, and I completely agree.
By the way, I was sorry to read that had retired from blogging, so to speak.
ktron
“The only way to effect real change is for all sides to drop their partisanship, forget about the phony left/right dichotomy and focus on those values we share”
Yes!
Maybe we can drop all the dichotomies? Can we stop pretending that ideas are flat coinage? Instead of dialogues, can we try polylogues?
Saskboy
As far as the media goes, I’ve given money to The Real News Network, and I hope others consider funding either them or other independent media in their town too.
http://therealnews.com/t2/
Saskboy
I’d never heard of polylogues before, but makes sense to have more conversations like this one with more than two (di) voices.
Moore on CNN ; Media Failure ; Election Results « Saskboy's Abandoned Stuff
[...] The Sixth Estate is hoping Canadians will organize to come up with solutions to give the majority a majority say in governance. Of eligible voters in May 2011, 24% … voted Conservative 13% … voted for an MP now in government 2% … voted for a Cabinet minister 0.1% … voted for Stephen Harper Percentages will be updated pending final results from Elections Canada. [...]
ErinvH
I have an idea for a place to start.
One of the things that has impressed me about the Conservatives, here and to the south, is their ability to co-opt media. The media didn’t come to this position out of pure self-interest; it came about because of a decades-long campaign to reframe the political debate, often one word at a time. A couple of examples: Who wouldn’t like the idea of tax relief? Well, anyone who realizes that in order to have relief from something, it must first be a burden (which is where the phrase “tax burden” comes from.) But taxes are how we buy civilization, and as soon as we let people forget that, we lose the battle to those who are winning over the “me” voters.
In a similar vein, “taxpayer” has taken over the popular conception in place of the word “citizen.” The Liberals evoked this image with their message, “You deserve better from the government YOU pay for.” That message appeals to a me voter – we need to get people thinking in terms of the common good, and get them to understand that their self-interest is better served when the common good is met than when it is not. We need to think in terms of government for all citizens, not just taxpayers.
Those are only two examples. Others include the idea of school choice, either within or without the public system; two-tier health care where people who can afford to pay for it, or can get someone other than the government to pay for it, create their own queue and lengthen the public queue; trickle-down economics; the list goes on.
We need to be combatting these ideas, daily, in the mainstream media. We need to be writing letters to the editors of our local papers. We need to be stumping about these things constantly in our local riding associations for whichever progressive parties we belong to (and if you don’t belong to one yet, what the hell are you waiting for?) We need to get them into our platforms and onto our radio call-in shows and into our classrooms. You can bet the Conservatives have been doing all of this and more, and furthermore, they’ve done it with sleaze: writing a form letter and getting many people to send versions of it to their local papers with their own names attached rather than the name of the actual author.
The battle for people’s minds begins with the language we choose to frame our debates. Conservatives have been framing the debate for thirty years, and that’s why progressives are losing elections.
ErinvH
One other item: I can tell you exactly why kids don’t get interested in politics through school, and again, the blame can mostly be laid at the feet of Conservatives.
First, who we’re talking about: we’re talking about the children whose parents are as well-off or better off than the teachers; who are accustomed to having their voices heard; and who believe that their right to dictate what their children learn trumps the government’s right to ensure its citizenry is educated. (That last is debated even by progressives, which is somewhat unfortunate.)
Teachers are in a delicate position. If they show their passion for politics, they are often accused of attempting to brainwash the students, and the people accusing them are those who are attempting to brainwash their kids in the other direction. Since teachers as a whole tend to be left-of-centre, especially in Canada, there are constant complaints that a teacher is injecting her own bias into lessons.
So teachers who are passionate about politics are hobbled – they’re afraid of the results if they talk about that in class, and their students are hearing at home about how those leeching teachers shouldn’t be talking about political ideas.
Meanwhile, the existence of curriculum documents that lay out exactly which year topics should be covered in have a disastrous side effect: they make it far more difficult to justify capitalizing on what are sometimes called “teachable moments.” For example, when I taught grade five, I tried to finagle it so that the government unit would coincide with an election if possible, because then I can get kids talking about the same things adults are talking about and use real media to do it. But the curriculum doesn’t encourage that. If I know there’s not going to be an election next year but there is one this year, I can’t throw over the grade four unit and teach government to the grade fours this year. I have to follow the curriculum, so those grade fours miss out on an opportunity. (Not a big problem for this year’s grade fours in Ontario, since there will be a provincial election in October, but the following year it will be a problem again.)
Combine teacher fear of having to defend themselves to parents and possibly complaints about their competence to the board of education, with a curriculum that locks topics into certain years, and you’ve got a recipe for disengagement.
Sixth Estate
Erin — on your first post, you’re definitely right, both about the 30-year war and the need to respond. That said, it’s going to be a serious uphill battle. Newspaper owners have a selfish reason to give extra space to anti-tax, anti-public programs advocacy.
I have heard similar comments about education before and, while I’m not a teacher, it certainly makes sense to me! I have written extensively on the Fraser Institute and standardized testing before, and am fully convinced that the attempt to break education down to standardized expectations for standardized tests is disastrous from the perspective of educating an informed citizenry.
http://sixthestate.net/?p=674
Neither governments nor those who fund these “studies” are particularly interested in a highly educated, critically engaged population.
ktron
ErinvH – I’m hoping you’d be happy with a slight alteration to your post? Governments do not have rights. It is a fundamental principle of democracy that all rights belong to individuals. The logical extension to this, even though it appears to have been forgotten in Canada, is that police do not have rights (individual officers do, but only the same as any other citizen), neither do churches, or unions, corporations, political parties, or any other organization. The individuals right to organize may be protected, but the resulting organization has no rights.
On the teaching kids front – when you have an opportunity to teach kids about things you believe in (whether in a structured setting or just on the front steps in the neighbourhood), it is often enough to just ask questions, and then encourage the kids to ask the next questions – of their parents. More often than not, if the parent’s answer is inadequate, the kids will be able to tell. I’ve found this applies equally well to questions of politics, science, and religion.
Sixth Estate
ktron — I’m probably speaking out of turn here (and I’m definitely speaking off the top of my head, having no experience in teaching), but my suspicion is that many progressive teachers feel they are in a situation where they will not receive adequate support from higher up in the event that parents complain, and that it is not easy or even ethical to run a classroom in which they may be turning students against their parents.
James Randi, who I respect very highly, once said that the main problem in getting proper science education in schools isn’t creationist school boards — it’s creationist parents. Many parents are understandably going to resent schools for sending home kids who question their authority in the home. They’re going to find support in that from the conservative anti-public school movement.
I realize that public schools should be where young citizens are formed — I definitely support that. But at the end of the day they can only do that effectively (and no disrespect to individual teachers intended here) if both teachers AND the administrators of the school system support that goal. And I personally do not believe that many Departments of Education in this country have as their number one priority (or as ANY priority, for that matter) the production of critically engaged citizens. Until that changes, front-line staff like teachers are going to be stuck making whatever small contributions they can in a system that is really headed in the other direction.
In terms of who has rights in this direction, I would say that the government has the legitimate POWER (which is different than a right) to provide a public education based on social awareness, citizenship, and democratic awareness. Or whatever priorities it sets instead — namely, at the moment, giving people some job skills or fulfilling college entrance requirements, and cutting down on parental daycare costs. It is our job as citizens to ensure that the government exercises that power responsibly.
Interestingly, I do not believe parental rights are listed anywhere in the Constitution or the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, though I may be mistaken on that point. I am not a Constitutional expert.
ktron
I think I was being a tad muddy there.
My proposal stems from these premises:
- democracy is a legal, historical, and philosophical idea
- democracy is built on presumptions of honesty and justice
- all modern democracies developed within religious societies
- there is a historical context to every subject
- kids have an amazing sense of justice
You’re absolutely right, no DOE has informed citizenship as part of its curriculum. There are some public schools (in my area we call them alternative schools) that strive to include the fundamentals of democracy in their approach, but these schools never go past grade eight. Ideally kids would be a bit older before you’d really be able to broach the nuances of real-politik, but I’m not suggesting we teach politics, I’m suggesting that we teach democracy. A passion for politics has no bearing on teaching about democracy; it is probably a hindrance.
I’ve never encountered the creationist issue in relation to public schooling (is that a western thing?) but again, our concern is democracy (not religion). Partisans love to generate angst over “old testementalism” (or should that be old-testes-mentalism?) but that’s just politics: this election was not a failure of politics, it was a triumph of politics, but this election was an abject and utter failure of democracy. Whether the goddess created the world from the back of a purple dinosaur shortly after a seado ride is just partisan distraction.
Kids reason in the abstract more than we give them credit for (the best teaching methods enhance this ability by not forcing abstract reasoning until kids have developed a firm base of experiential learning). Fair play is a concept all kids understand and virtually all are quite willing to uphold: from this it is possible to develop limitless approaches to learning about democratic concepts without ever entering into the realm of partisan fundamentalism.
Do you think any parent would object to speaking to their kids about whether their or not their MPs are telling the truth? Let’s take the Oda-not routine: could a parent object to a teacher asking kids if it was right for them to insert words into a permission slip that their parents had already signed in order to change its meaning? How about parliamentary conduct: could a parent object to a teacher asking their class to see how their family felt about them bellowing at the top of their lungs until their parents stopped asking them questions they didn’t want to answer?
The whole idea of public education was that democracies required educated citizens to remain strong and free (from the Jeffersonian POV that is, officially at least – but this is a whole other topic). Is it worth considering whether any teacher who can not find a way to teach about democracy’s reliance on honesty and justice should be teaching? If the public system can’t handle this challenge, should we just fees up and admit that its really about daycare, not education?
Sixth Estate
ktron — I guess I wasn’t clear. I meant the Randi quote as a comparison that I suspected would apply here as well. What I meant by that was that with a school system administration uninterested in educating critically engaged citizens on the one hand and parents uninterested in having their kids come home questioning authority and being “influenced by commie teachers” or some such, I don’t think it’s at all surprising that teachers are a little nervous.
Yes, the idea that you shouldn’t alter a document after your parents have signed it sounds like a great principle. But just look at the number of Conservatives in online forums who get very upset when you suggest that when grown-ups alter papers in government it’s NOT all totally okay and above-board, and I think you’ll see that a lot of people really aren’t all that interested in systematic application of moral principles. Or rather, they just don’t care enough to think about it in those terms.
Don’t get me wrong, I entirely agree with you, and I’d love to see a school system that tried to do those things. (Not being a teacher I hesitate on the specific application, but it does seem like admirable goals, certainly equally important as job skills, etc., in most cases.) And yes, the ability to draw out these citizenship skills is something we should look for in teachers. But I think you’re kidding yourself if you think there isn’t a large component of (a) just teach my kid to read and do math so they can get a job/get into university, and (b) flat-out daycare. After all, I can think of no other plausible reason for ridiculous schemes like full-day kindergarten than the amount of money it will save parents on daycare fees.
Teachers are professionals, not (or not only) radicals, and their ability to teach what you or I might think is important to kids is necessarily going to be limited by the willingness of the system they work within to support them in pursuing those outcomes.
ktron
Sorry about misreading an example as a specific complaint. The idea of that inane debate coming north of the 49th set me off on a tangent: Gary Goodyear take note!
ErinvH’s point about political machines mass distributing centralized propaganda should have kept me on track. Those planted reader’s letters only get printed in media outlets that support the political content of the letters. Worse yet these outlets tend to use these letters as tools to pry attention away from aspects of party platforms that are not being aired in the media. BigMedia is tied to BigCorpo so we need to find other ways of getting ideas out to the populace. Hopefully many teachers do embrace the dissenting role and find little ways of introducing democratic ideas into the classroom, regardless of curriculum: surely we haven’t devolved so far that any school-board could discipline a teacher for instructing students not to lie or cheat?
The question of teacher involvement in democracy is moot – our institutions have clearly shown that they are not up to the task. This process will have to be a one-on-one process, not an institutional process. The reform party built from the basic strengths of individuals, then gradually moved toward the corporate approach of mass fears for the masses. They have now effectively removed individual candidates from the equation, centralized and limited their message – this will now be their weakness. The intelligent alternative is to get back to the individual level, remind people one at a time that democracy is about diversity, and show them that there is more to life than fear and a paycheck.
ErinvH
I think the two of you (Ktron and SixthEstate) are understating the ability of the public school system to encourage critical thought. My experience is that it’s being encouraged by Ontario’s Ministry of Education, though some of the mechanisms of encouragement are rather Orwellian. (More on that later.) The literacy training that the majority of elementary teachers in Ontario have now received and are expected to implement is founded in the premise that the place to begin classroom discussions is at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy; that is, you begin with the big questions, the synthesis questions about right and wrong and judgements, and work your way down to the nitty-gritty from there.
For example, there’s a story in the grade five Nelson Literacy textbook that came out a few years ago about a Jewish girl in a Nazi ghetto who volunteers to work in the garden so that she has the chance to steal food for her mother. Nowhere in the questions could I find the knowledge-based questions of yesteryear, about the characters’ names, the setting, or even the plot. No, the questions jumped right to: “Is it always wrong to steal?” Teachers are expected to backform the lower levels of the taxonomy from there, but we’re to start at the top.
Given that this is supposed to be standard operating procedure in Ontario classrooms, it’s not too big of a jump to imagine that critical analysis is indeed a key goal of the school system at the moment.
What I will give you is that this is not consistently applied to all topics of study. The level of questions in the Ancient Civilizations unit was considerably higher than the level of questions in the government unit, which lacked both meat and teeth to begin with. (I pretty much ignored it and went for the Five Big Questions of Critical Literacy as they applied to election material instead. My kids had a field day analysing the pictures on campaign materials, and realizing that every party promised to create jobs, lower taxes, support families, and do good things for the environment.) However, the foundational elements for critical literacy being applied to government are woven throughout Ontario’s curriculum documents and supporting resources, whether or not the bureaucrats who put them there actually expected them to be applied that way. If I’m careful about how I ask the questions and how I answer them, I can get away with a LOT of encouraging critical thinking about government by pointing to those expectations, and the school board will support me that far; it’s just that most teachers don’t want to have to go through the defence process so they don’t go as deep into the topics as I do.
As for Orwellian methods of teaching teachers, basically, kids are supposed to learn through constructivist discovery and good questioning, but teachers are told what to do in a top-down model – and what they’re told is that top-down teaching doesn’t work. I have my own beefs with the Ministry of Education, can you tell?
Sixth Estate
I’m very encouraged by what you’re saying, Erin. It does not match with my experience of the high school system just ten years ago, but I am encouraged by it. Of course it is entirely unsurprising to me that contemporary government gets less critical thinking than ancient history.
Assuming this is a policy of long standing, it means we have to again look elsewhere for causes of political disengagement. When I went to school the only education we ever received about politics was a discussion of basic party and Parliamentary organization in social studies. Even learning that tax cuts by definition equal spending cuts would have been a help. That’s a basic fact that most of society still does not seem to have learned.
Ah, constructivism versus top-down again. I’ve heard this one before. Don’t you know you’re just a factory worker expected to follow procedure? Leave the thinking to the people in government, who if they’re anything like the province I’m from have no significant front-line experience to speak of.
ErinvH
I’m not surprised you didn’t get it ten years ago. Most high school teachers aren’t doing it now, even in Ontario, where it’s been pushed. It’s in the elementary panel that the big changes have come, and one of the huge problems is the overall inertia of the secondary panel compared to the elementary panel – not to mention the chasm that exists between the two branches of the teaching profession.
In Ontario, the push began with the Harris government’s new curriculum in 1997, but that government basically threw it at teachers and said, “Do this.” Meanwhile, they were cutting funding and support all over the place, so nothing changed except a lot more stress. The real changes started under the McGuinty Liberal government, where support was ramped up and teacher training went ahead full-steam. They also revised the curriculum to make it say the same things, only better-organized and with a firmer emphasis on strategies. Now, strategies like identifying points of view begin in kindergarten and are gradually increased so that grade fives are expected to be able to identify, not only the point of view that is present, but the ones that are missing.
We still have the problems I mentioned above to contribute to political disengagement. The social studies curriculum for government talks a lot about getting kids to think about their rights, why they have them and what they mean, and responsibilities to vote and contribute in other ways, but it does not encourage critical thinking about parties and platforms and government. I believe the reason for this is the politicization of the teaching profession, where we so often have to battle against right-wing idealogues in our governments that those who vote for those idealogues don’t trust us to leave our biases out of the classroom. Teachers bought into the notion that politics doesn’t belong in the classroom, and that’s a terrible shame. And there are still a lot of teachers who teach THIS unit in the fall and THAT OTHER unit in the spring, and if there’s an election in between, they don’t have time for it because they’re working on science at that point. The rigidity of the curriculum is a detriment to child-centred learning.
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