I’m reluctant to bemoan Harper’s recent victory as The Apocalypse, but it might qualify as an apocalypse in its original sense, as an “uncovering.”
A certain reading of Yeats’s The Second Coming does make it an allegory for what was known, on Twitter, as #elxn41: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The Liberal party collapsed, and an antiquated electoral system awarded a majority to an antiquated ideology. But more importantly, the Liberal party collapsed.
To say the wings fell off the LPC would be generous. Better to say the wings fell off, the pilot gave his final battle cry of “Government, Or Something!” and ejected before the whole mess. It was mostly to this, and not Layton’s victory, that I drank (and drank and drank) on election night.
More choice usually means a healthier electoral system. (I won’t call it democracy.) Usually. But despite a few exceptional members who prove the rule, the Liberals – their uncompromisingly tepid platform, their irrepressibly somnambulant leader, their hodge-podge right-wing-but-with-taxes ideology – weren’t much of an option.
There’s a long-brewing political backlash, of which Harper and Ford are symptoms, and to weather the storm we’ll need more than political parties. We’ll need neighbours.
Mine did not disappoint. As the election heated up, I watched friends who didn’t consider themselves political become just that.
This was the real strength of Layton’s surge. And as results sank in, some friends were already passing through the stages of grief into a fertile despair.
“We need something new,” declared one friend calmly, turning away from the TV in the corner of the bar. Not new leaders, not new candidates, but new politics or something beyond. “I’ll admit it, I’ve been having some pretty radical thoughts,” seethed another the next day.
These aren’t kids. These aren’t anarchists. These people run businesses. And they don’t drink Orange Crush.
I like the idea of more than two parties. Especially if one proves to be different. The danger facing the NDP may be the assumption that their growing base just wants Liberal promises from an NDP government.
People love an underdog, so Layton will need a new trick to continue the surge – and actually expand beyond Quebec – the next time around. That may include making federal politics about, you know, things.
Let’s play Liberal Or NDP. Guess whether Layton or Ignatieff re-emphasized these priorities on election-night: “Improve health care… strengthen retirement… help families… grow our economy.”
Though Layton did toss climate change and First Nations in with the rhetorical laundry, it was strange to feel inspired by a third-party surge yet left cold by the words of its eloquent leader.
Absent was recognition of what makes the surge so exciting: the economic crisis faced across the industrialized world. “Grow our economy?” Our economy is the problem.
The free advice now offered the NDP is to hammer Harper on economic “mismanagement.”
Well, thank you, but the economic system is hostile to dignity, sovereignty and sustainability, and the left needs to dream bigger than riding the brakes harder.
But there is hope, evidenced by a Clean Train Coalition party at the Gladstone Monday, May 16. In the crowd were a number of lefty politicians, all with grassroots cred and some newly elected: Councillor Gord Perks, MPP Cheri DiNovo, new (again) MP Peggy Nash, new MPs Andrew Cash and Mike Sullivan. To be surrounded by reps who are community activists was heartening.
Activists are needed. Our best hope, amidst the sturm und drang (und drang, und drang), is an institutional left that doesn’t just siphon popular energy toward set changes in sterile operas, but widens the stage, using its influence for grassroots struggle.
Don’t become entranced, like the Grits, by the mirage of the centre. As Yeats said, it cannot hold -? but as for “Mere anarchy… loosed upon the world”? Well, it’s worth a try.
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