the Walnut Diary

In The Voyage to Lilliput Jonathan Swift portrayed a class of men whose fortunes depended upon their skill at balancing on a tightrope.  Another group analyzed such performances and predicted who would fall and when.  Swift’s light satire of the British Parliament takes an ugly turn, however, when Gulliver realizes that these beautiful miniature humans routinely use their laws to justify savage acts of aggression and greed, and there is no virtue in them.

I fear Swift’s words apply as well to democracy in the 21st Century as they did in the 18th.  The signature moment of the last quarter of the 20th Century had to be the death of communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The first quarter of the 21st may well mark the death of democracy.

Let’s look at the last two years in Canada as an example.  The Liberal leadership convention was manipulated by Gerard Kennedy, a clever rope-balancer who would not have appeared out of place in Gulliver’s Travels.  In hopes of personal benefit he formed an alliance with Stephane Dion to leapfrog the two leading contenders.  Delegates with an eye on little but victory went along with the plan, and almost by luck of the draw Stephane Dion ended up the deeply-flawed leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.

This left the door open for Stephen Harper, a man of unsteady balance, to take power and keep it by a ruthless campaign of partisan attacks upon any and all opponents.

I am disgusted at the gleeful way that Harper and his minions pick over the bones of what was once the great institution of Parliament, but I recall what has happened to leaders in Canada who have attempted to act unselfishly.   At his retirement Bill Davis extended full funding to Catholic schools.    John Tory promoted equitable funding for the schools of all religious denominations.  Voters rejected the plans resoundingly.   An election campaign is no place for ideals.

Stephane Dion’s carbon tax was the right  approach to lead Canada into a new century, but citizens voted their wallets, their prejudices, and the images created for them on television.  All Harper had to do was claim loudly that the plan was “crazy” and “would screw everybody” – even when his own studies proved the opposite to be true – and voters gleefully torpedoed the Liberal Party.

Then we come to Count Ignatieff, a man who  shows little interest in democracy, but seems willing to listen to Canadians.  His reluctant philosopher-king persona harkens back to a time when wisdom, vision, and commitment to the greater good were what mattered in a leader, not fund-raising ability or the willingness to savage opponents.  Perhaps it is appropriate that he took office by coronation.  Democracy hasn’t exactly distinguished itself lately.

Then we look below the border to the Obama inauguration.  I like Obama and I love his oratory.  The doubt in the back of my mind has to do with the nature of his democratic mandate.  Admittedly, the Republican Party was so bankrupt after eight years of George Bush that they had lost the will to govern.  They selected the most liberal of all their candidates  and then wondered why few Republicans supported him.  They cheered when McCain brought in the Palin soap opera to energize  the most conservative Republican voters.  Neither of these tactical errors ensured the victory of Obama, but one blooper killed the McCain campaign:  they failed to raise enough money.

Obama may come to be known as the Internet president.   While McCain made the fatal error of admitting that he couldn’t use email, Obama’s  political machine used social networking sites to raise millions of small contributions from individuals.  It is here that his “democratic” mandate lies.  The flow of cash left no doubt that many, many people bought into Obama’s vision of a better world.

These funds enabled his campaign to blanket the culture with advertising, even to the point of buying space for billboards in video games.  The U.S. Presidential Election was won not on the debating podium, but in the battle of the budgets.   Obama had four times the money to spend that McCain had.  That’s democratic in some sense, but I still have my doubts.

So what’s wrong with selecting leaders by vote?  It should work fine in a village to hire a dog catcher.  It might conceivably work to elect a president in the U.S. system.  But Canada is a vast mosaic of cultural, regional, and economic groups.  To cram all of their needs and aspirations into a single ballot is to enable the tyranny of the winner over the vast majority.

All it took to form the government of Canada the last time was 37.6% of the vote, with a turnout of 59.1%.  But Stephen Harper took the choices of the 22% of Canadian citizens who voted for his party as a personal mandate to bludgeon the 78% who did not support him.  Thus in his first economic statement Jim Flaherty went after the opposition parties, public servants and women, and Harper showed his spite after a failed courtship with bridge-blowing tactics designed to cut Quebec off from the rest of  Canada.

So now comes the new budget. That pall over Ottawa these days is the smell of Stephen Harper’s Hush Puppies smouldering as Iggie holds the PM’s feet to the Parliamentary furnace.  This undignified Anglo Saxon method of encouraging a man to keep his word might very well work.  Be ready for plenty of squeals from Harper and his minions this week, though.