Riding On The Back Of The Tiger

These days, our politics are driven by anger. Konrad Yakabuski writes:

Former federal Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole spoke for many Canadians distressed at the increasing nastiness of our political discourse in tweeting a desire to see fewer “profanity-laden Trudeau flags” hoisted across the country in 2023. He was spot on in warning that these banners attacking Prime Minster Justin Trudeau “and the hyperaggressive rhetoric that often accompanies them are slowly normalizing rage and damaging our democracy.” Kudos to him for speaking up.

No, Mr. O’Toole has not switched sides after being ousted as leader in the early days of last winter’s occupation of downtown Ottawa by opponents of vaccine mandates. But he appears to have had a change of heart after learning the hard way about what happens when attempts to feed popular anger for political gain turn against you.

O'Toole helped fuel that anger:

Remember that Mr. O’Toole ran for his party’s leadership in 2021 by promising to “take back Canada.” The slogan implied that conservatives had been dispossessed of their own country by a Liberal government that was pursuing a leftist agenda. It sought to stoke indignation and anger in just enough new and old Tories to win the leadership under rules that gave disproportionate weighting to low-membership ridings.

Mr. O’Toole fatefully went on to discover that, in the social media age, exploiting the anger of a highly mobilized faction of uncompromising voters can quickly come back to bite you at the slightest sign of betrayal. A vocal minority of hardliners shows zero tolerance for nuanced thinkers within their own parties or movements. This rule applies equally on the right and left, which is why our politics have become so polarized.

Mr. O’Toole became a casualty of this polarization just as Pierre Poilievre was discovering its usefulness in advancing his own political ambitions. Mr. Poilievre’s embrace of the Freedom Convoy protesters who descended nearly a year ago on Ottawa, where the F*** Trudeau flags that Mr. O’Toole denounces first proliferated, demonstrated his superior grasp of the dynamics of social media.

The Americans are further down this road than we are:

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has attributed Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the U.S. presidency in 2016 to his mastery of these dynamics “in which outrage is the key to virality, stage performance crushes competence, Twitter can overpower all the newspapers in the country, and stories cannot be shared (or at least trusted) across more than a few adjacent fragments – so truth cannot achieve widespread adherence.”

Mr. Poilievre won the 2022 Conservative leadership race to replace Mr. O’Toole by following this same social media playbook. He has continued to follow it since, largely bypassing mainstream media channels to reinforce a message that seeks to intensify feelings of indignation, frustration and anger among Canadians seeking to vent.

His November YouTube video, in which he asks whether “everything is broken in Canada” against the backdrop of “another tent city” in Vancouver, is pure performance art. It is highly manipulative, and representative of the fragmented politics of the social media age, where the art of persuasion has been replaced by efforts to reinforce the confirmation biases of your existing followers.

Today's politicians have forgotten the wisdom of that old tale that reminds us of what happens to the person who rides on the back of the tiger.

Image: AZ Quotes

Too Much Plenty?

George F. Will has an interesting thesis: Our politics are toxic because we live in an age of plenty. I'm not sure I buy it. But I place it before you:

In 1930, the beginning of the Great Depression and of a decade that would end with the beginning of the worst of wars, a great economist wrote an essay (“Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”) of ambivalent cheerfulness. John Maynard Keynes said the economic problem, “the struggle for subsistence,” was approaching solution. Another century of growth — by around now — would mean that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares … to live wisely and agreeably and well.”

So, material plenty deprives humanity of what had been its unavoidable preoccupation. This would be a problem, Keynes wrote, that could plunge society into something akin to a “nervous breakdown.” Brink Lindsey says that Americans who think Keynes was mistaken should look around.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, indulging in progressive utopianism, insisted that “necessitous men are not free.” If so, freedom is the absence of necessity. But living beyond necessities is not enticing: Surmounting necessities is a source of life’s meaning and satisfaction.

Will speculates that, with so many Americans living above the poverty line, America is experiencing a nervous breakdown. He cites Lindsey:

“Reported unhappiness is on the rise, and mental health problems are surging. Morbid obesity is becoming normal … IQ scores have begun falling. Marriage and childbearing and personal friendships and community involvement are all becoming less common … We now have all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, but the social authority of that knowledge has fallen into embattled retreat while conspiracy theories and mass delusions fill the vacuum … Where once workplace solidarity and tight-knit social relationships were compensations for lower economic standing, now the new class divide leaves those outside the elite increasingly atomized and adrift … In the industrial era, workers had it much tougher physically, but the status of the working class in social estimation was incomparably higher than today.”

Lindsey’s list of social ills does not include the one that is the most debilitating because it impedes addressing the others: the poisonous politics of rivalrous grievances. A politics of distributional conflict — who gets what from whom — is banal, but it is better than today’s politics of cultural contempt and score-settling: who gets even with whom. Today’s political conversation is dominated by tone-setting minority factions who would be improved by banality.

The politics of grasping is unlovely, but not as ugly as politics treated as a mode of cultural bullying and disparagement. As memories of subsistence struggles recede, people who are no longer necessitous are indeed free — free to use politics for unpleasant self-expression. Their default mentality is anger, which reminds them that they are alive.

“The effect of liberty to individuals,” said Edmund Burke, “is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.” The fundamental economic problem of attaining subsistence having been banished by plenty, many hyper-politicized Americans have filled the void in their lives with the grim fun of venting their animosities. This would not have surprised Peter De Vries, the wittiest American writer since Mark Twain: “Human nature is shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

As I see it, the way the plenty is distributed has a lot to do with the anger. But I admit that there's more to it than that.

Image: Roll Call