Authors: Michael Ignatieff
You would have thought that contempt of Parliament and contempt for democracy would be issues that would arouse the patriotic ire of citizens beyond the precincts of the chamber. You would be wrong. When I tried to make the parlous state of our democracy and the rancid partisanship of the government a major issue, most Canadians appeared to shrug. I learned that most voters have relatively little knowledge of the parliamentary system, small patience with allegations of democratic abuse and almost complete lack of interest in proposals for reform. The government understood this better than we did and played shamelessly to the public’s cynicism about Parliament by dismissing all our charges as mere partisan bickering.
There was one moment in my time in Parliament, however, that suggested to me that the public’s disconnection from the House of Commons was not the whole story, and that there was also a deep yearning to see it restored to its proper place as the people’s house. The occasion was the solemn apology offered in the House by the government to victims of Canada’s aboriginal residential schools. These schools, opened in the late nineteenth century to assimilate Indian children, were run on contract by Catholic and Protestant churches, and to their shame, children were sexually and physically abused, beaten and scarred for life by their experiences. The schools were all closed by the 1980s, but at every visit to an aboriginal community, we felt the weight of the traumatic memories they had left in their wake. When Zsuzsanna and I visited the Stó:lō nation, a BC Indian community on the banks of the Fraser River, one of the elders told us, in a halting voice, about her experience of the residential schools and concluded, with a sad shrug, “How can you expect any of us to send our children away for education?” Successive governments, including our own, had tried to overcome this legacy. It is to the prime minister’s credit that he hammered out a financial settlement to the residential
schools claims and arranged for a ceremony of apology in the House of Commons in June 2008. Representatives from the aboriginal peoples took their seats in the main aisle of the House of Commons and the galleries were packed with people from aboriginal communities across the country, many of them in the ceremonial dress of their tribe. Solemn speeches were given by the prime minister and by the aboriginal leaders on the floor of the House, but I don’t remember them well. What I recall vividly were the people in the gallery, leaning forward, the intensity of their attention investing the occasion with resonance and emotion. Afterward, when the ceremony concluded, aboriginal families streamed out across the lawns of Parliament and I talked with them, sat in their circles on the grass and listened as they talked about what the event in Parliament had meant to them: recognition and the promise of a new beginning. There was something moving—and also poignant—about the seriousness with which we took the occasion, especially since aboriginal Canadians have been deeply ambivalent about their political membership in our country. They were not accorded the vote in federal elections until 1960, and to this day they vote more frequently in their tribal elections than in national ones. Yet here they were in huge numbers, affirming their desire to have their historical sufferings recognized in Parliament. Those of us who worked in the House had become so habituated to the partisan bloodletting in the place that it came as a surprise to see Canadians reminding us what our Parliament was supposed to be for. The final irony of that day of apology is worth remembering as well. Since that June day in 2008, with its promises of renewal, precious little has happened. Aboriginal Canadians—and Canadians in general—are still waiting for their politicians to live up to the promise of that moment.
Apart from this one moment, when we came together to remember and rededicate ourselves, a widening gulf separates citizens and
politicians. The gulf is over the issue of partisanship. From a politician’s point of view, partisanship is the essence of politics. You join a team, choose your leader, issue a platform and then march forth to do battle with the other side. Partisanship means putting party line first and personal judgment second. Loyalty is the moral core of partisanship, the value that trumps all others.
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Once you become a partisan, you enter an information bubble of political positioning. You abjure the other side, do not keep company with them, and define them as everything you oppose. Partisanship defines the world you take as normal. As I’ve said, I had no friends on the other side during my time in politics. We never ate, drank or talked with people on the government benches. If you were found talking to someone on the other side while walking on the treadmill in the parliamentary gym, for example, rumours would start that you were thinking of crossing the aisle. In retrospect, this seems crazy. Had Liberals fraternized with New Democrats in our minority parliaments, coalition might have been less of a leap into the dark, but at the time, I felt uncomfortable about fraternizing with adversaries. In former times, so the old hands would tell me, members from opposing parties would dine or drink together when sessions ran late, and these rituals of conviviality reinforced the rules of civility inside the chamber. Nowadays, partisanship has degenerated from the rough-and-tumble jousting of former days to really venomous character assassination. From a politician’s point of view, partisanship is not some excess or disorder of politics. “Differentiation” is the nature of the business. The people deserve a choice and it is the job of a politician to present that choice in clear and necessarily stark terms. Dramatizing the choice, presenting it in shades of black and white, is essential if you hope to rouse voters from their state of grey on grey. If a politician fails to be partisan, fails to stick up for his team’s ideas and starts freelancing his own line, he’s not a politician, he is a fool.
When seen from the outside, however, partisanship is what poisons politics for the public. The bitter exchanges seem to have nothing to do with them or their interests. For many voters, partisan politics is a hypocritical show conducted for the exclusive benefit of the political class. It was striking, at ribbon-cuttings, dedications and other public events, how we politicians introduced our colleagues so fulsomely, effectively turning these gatherings into a High Mass of self-congratulation. When plaques were unveiled or foundation stones were laid, we politicians jostled to be in the shot and made sure our pictures made the local papers. These are the sorry scenes that lead voters to shake their heads and conclude: “They’re only in it for themselves.”
Voters also tell you that they hate the partisanship because it’s so insincere. They can’t believe what politicians say because politicians don’t appear to believe it themselves. Certainly, the voters are not wrong about this. Partisanship puts a premium on loyalty over honesty, repeating party mantras at the expense of sticking up for what you believe. Every politician who has ever lived has had to sell some snake oil. For those who believe the essence of the political vocation is to speak truth to power, hypocrisy is morally repellent. But it is often necessary. In the best lecture ever given about politics, “Politics as a Vocation,” delivered in 1919 by the German sociologist Max Weber, he said those who choose truth over loyalty are practising “an ethic of ultimate ends.”
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There will always be those who set their compass by such an ethic, but their careers in politics are likely to be short. Against an ethic of ultimate ends, Weber posited “an ethic of responsibility” that focuses duty on the question To whom am I responsible? If the answer is the voters, you can’t accomplish anything for them if you value your conscience more highly than you value their interests.
Many of the voters I met, especially young ones, believed that politics ought to be true to the ethic of ultimate ends. I came to believe
that my own conscience mattered, but party unity mattered more if we were to get power. Without power, we could do nothing. But there was a clear limit to what power could demand of you. You couldn’t afford to forget what the truth actually was, and if you did, you risked becoming a hack. Most politicians don’t knowingly turn themselves into hacks. You try to hold on to to your true shape as best you can, but there’s no possibility of keeping it altogether in the compromises politics forces upon you. My staff and I constantly debated, for example, whether we should take the “high road” or the “low road” in replying to the constant adversarial barrage from the other side, and sometimes, truth be told, we let ourselves get down in the mud with our opponents. Needless to say, when we did, we came up looking as soiled as our adversaries.
All the same, the cynical charge, so often made against politicians, that they invariably choose expediency over principle, is simply untrue. I took positions as leader of the party that I thought were right even though they cost us votes. It was right to come out against the export of asbestos, since its uncontrolled use can be lethal, even though the position cost us seats in towns that mined it, like Asbestos, Quebec. It was right to defend gun control against Conservative attempts to dismantle it, though our position cost us seats in northern and remote communities. When I persuaded my good friend Larry Bagnell, member of Parliament for the Yukon, to vote in favour of gun control, there were tears in his eyes when he rose in the chamber to cast his vote; he knew full well that his vote might cost him his seat. And, in the event, it did. It was right for our party to refuse to vote for more mandatory minimum sentences and more prisons; on crime issues, we chose the politics of evidence ahead of the politics of fear. But it cost us votes. So if partisanship is the essence of politics, partisan interest did not always prevail. Indeed, if it had, we might have been more successful.
I learned that you can’t take refuge in moral purity if you want to achieve anything, but equally, if you sacrifice all principle, you lose the reason you went into politics in the first place. These are the essential dilemmas of political life, but they are what make politics exciting. You can’t achieve anything unless you put yourself in harm’s way. Sometimes, I felt that voters’ impatience (especially among younger voters) with the necessary compromises of political life was a little easy and their disgust with politicians an excuse to justify their own failure to step up and get involved.
A further dilemma that voters often failed to understand is that politicians who actually want to win power have to face both ways at once. To solidify their base, they have to be partisans. Red meat must be thrown to the hounds. At the same time, the politician has to reach beyond the partisan corral to those floating voters who want to be spoken
to
, not spoken
for
. A good politician has to be simultaneously in the battle and above the fray. A great old Scottish politician once put it this way: “A man who can’t ride two bloody horses at once has no right to a job in the bloody circus.”
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If partisanship were only a circus trick—riding two bloody horses at once—the worst that could be said is that it is a poor show. But the voters’ problem with it runs deeper. Partisanship divides an already divided society and turns adversaries into enemies. An adversary has to be defeated, while an enemy must be destroyed. You cannot compromise with enemies. With adversaries compromise is possible. An adversary today can become an ally tomorrow. In my time in politics, I served in Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The word “loyal” defines opposition as a legitimate function in any democracy worth the name. Governments ought not to question the loyalty of those who oppose them, though the government I faced did so continually. They treated us not as adversaries, but as enemies. Democracy depends on
persuasion, on the idea that you might be able to win over an adversary today and turn him or her into an ally tomorrow. In the politics we have now, persuasion is dying. In parliamentary democracies and republican legislatures alike, votes are decided in advance and nothing turns on persuasion, on attempts to reach out across the aisle. Party discipline eliminates the need to persuade and hence the incentive to be civil. When persuasion doesn’t come into democratic debate, exchanges become pointless displays of venom. Nothing lowers a citizen’s estimate of democracy more than the sight of two politicians hurling abuse at each other in an otherwise empty chamber, but this is now a common sight in legislatures around the world. As power ebbs away from legislatures and accrues steadily to the executive and the bureaucracy, debate within democratic chambers becomes both unpleasant and meaningless. Democratic peoples have reason to fear this double phenomenon—waning legislative democracy and heightened partisanship—because taken together they weaken one of democracy’s crucial functions: to keep adversaries from becoming enemies.
The cure lies in civility, but civility is more than politeness. It’s the recognition that your opponent’s loyalty is equal to your own just as his good faith is equal to your own. This recognition does not preclude adversarial competition, even a tough punch or two, but it proceeds from a shared understanding that democracy, properly speaking, is the politics of adversaries. Against this, we increasingly have the politics of enemies. In this perversion of the game, politics is modelled as war itself. The aim is not to defeat an adversary but to destroy an enemy by denying them standing. We need to attend carefully to where all the loose macho talk about politics as war can lead. War, Carl von Clausewitz said, was the continuation of politics by other means, but politics is
not
the continuation of war.
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It is the alternative
to it. We care about politics, defend it, seek to preserve its vitality, because its purpose is to save us from the worst.
Our Conservative opponents had little originality but all the ferocity born of thirteen frustrating years in opposition. They had borrowed the entire playbook of negative attack from their American republican counterparts, together with the mental world that went with it: politics as war and adversaries as enemies. The war metaphor has insidious effects: it legitimizes a “take no prisoners” approach. War talk provides the standard justification for the black arts of negative advertising. Negative advertising certainly works, but it turns ordinary people off politics, reinforces the gulf between the people and the political class and makes it ever more difficult for political leaders to rally, inspire and motivate. Negative advertising poisons the well of politics, kills the trust between governors and governed on which good government depends.