NDP Bits & Pieces
Post
08/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, Spare us the NDP's mistaken moral crusades, (Source).
09/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, The NDP won't stop preaching to the converted, (Source).
09/09/06, Rex Murphy, Satire has forgotten its function, (Source).
08/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, Spare us the NDP's mistaken moral crusades, (Back).
QUEBEC CITY — The New Democratic Party, largely because it has never known the responsibility and discipline of power, views a frequently immoral world through the prism of moral crusades. Like so many Canadians, the NDP wants Canada to do good in a bad world, whose miseries the party instinctively blames on the United States.
The Bush administration therefore provides an irresistible target, for reasons quite easy to understand, but the instinctive anti-Americanism ingrained in the NDP runs deeper than distaste for this administration.
Anti-Americanism reflects New Democrats' suspicion of market capitalism, transnational corporate structures, free trade, wealth and, most profoundly, the use of power in international affairs -- all of which are associated negatively with the United States.
Instinctively siding with underdogs, New Democrats dislike top dogs such as the United States, and its friends such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the subject of almost universal loathing within the NDP. This dislike now infects the NDP's attitudes toward Israel, a country for which the early generations of Canadian socialists showed sympathy and solidarity, in contrast to today's party preferences for Palestinians whose struggle ignites the NDP's moral fire.
Of course, many New Democrats will take umbrage at this description, insisting some of their best friends are Americans. But even the most casual perusal of NDP speeches or review of party positions, let alone a glance at the many resolutions presented at this weekend's convention, demonstrates the fatuousness of this denial.
Leader Jack Layton's call for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan is the latest manifestation of this instinct, since he justified his position, in part, by insisting that Canada was foolishly following "George Bush."
It is true that after 9/11 -- the senior perpetrators of which had lived and thrived in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime -- the United States (and others) attacked Afghanistan to replace the regime.
Subsequently, seven United Nations resolutions (in contrast to the Iraq invasion) authorized the creation of a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, whose leaders since the beginning have come from Britain, Turkey, Germany, Canada, France and Italy. Normally, the NDP insists on UN approval for any international force projection, but once ISAF began to fight, it became part of U.S. war-making and therefore illegitimate for the NDP. Instead of stopping the Taliban from returning to power, as the UN wanted, the NDP stance was to negotiate with the Taliban -- over what, precisely, remained unclear.
Meanwhile, Mr. Layton proposed that Canadian forces take the lead in Darfur, without specifying how the African Union, which does not want NATO forces there, could be otherwise persuaded -- to say nothing of the Sudanese government.
But Darfur had taken on the allure of a moral crusade, more compelling apparently than that of the plight of ordinary Afghans under the Taliban, and so the ever-changing moral compass of the NDP swung toward Africa, the theory being that in Darfur Canadian soldiers would be keeping the peace rather than making war.
It was never clear, of course, just how the peace could be kept in Darfur without the application of force against marauding gangs who, with the encouragement of the government in Khartoum, murder, maim and rape. Nor was it clear how the unwanted Canadians would implant themselves in a place they knew next-to-nothing about, at the head of a force few other countries wished to join.
But the NDP, unschooled in the realpolitik of the world and besotted by anti-Americanism, has sought (with some success) to position itself domestically as the custodian of Canada's international virtue, however exaggerated that virtue might be and however overwrought it often appears in the eyes of the world.
Foreign policy is, of course, an extension of domestic politics. The call to leave Afghanistan, the party hopes, will fall on especially receptive ears in Quebec, where anti-Americanism is rife on the political left and in nationalist circles, and where all military commitments are regarded with inherent suspicion.
The other day, one of the old lions of the Parti Québécois, Jacques Brassard, penned an article imploring Quebec separatists to drop their anti-American, anti-Israel attitudes and offer a more balanced, and therefore a more realistic, view of the world.
It's too bad no NDP elder statesman would echo similar sentiments. Chances are, sadly, that such a call would be just as ignored in the NDP as Mr. Brassard's in the Bloc Québécois.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
09/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, The NDP won't stop preaching to the converted, (Back).
QUEBEC CITY — The explicit aspiration of the New Democratic Party for this weekend's convention was to make the party appear “ready to govern” or at least to become the “real opposition.”
The convention looks set to fail on both counts, not because the convention lacked effective organization, but because the NDP is intellectually stuck.
The NDP has its world — 15 to 18 per cent of the Canadian electorate — but, apparently, it cannot look beyond that world to a bigger, broader coalition.
The departure this week of Paul Summerville illustrates one reason why, a reason reinforced in spades at the convention. A banker, Mr. Summerville decided to run in Toronto for the party in the last election. He was held aloft like a political trophy by the NDP by way of illustrating that the party accepted the market economy.
Mr. Summerville has now left, attracted instead by Bob Rae, a Liberal leadership candidate. Mr. Summerville, therefore, follows former New Democrat politicians and activists such as Ujjal Dosanjh, Chris Axworthy, Janice MacKinnon and, of course, Mr. Rae, himself, all of whom formally or quietly moved away from the party because they could not abide its ideological rigidities.
It's revealing, if somewhat unfair, to judge a party by resolutions that riding associations submit to a convention. Every party has wacko elements. Drafting resolutions to change the world at some sparsely attended mid-winter constituency meeting of two dozen activists is the ultimate in unchecked political fantasy.
Nonetheless, looking through hundreds of resolutions gives a broad reflection of where party members want to go, how they see the world and what their priorities are. No wonder Mr. Summerville left.
Nowhere in the resolutions do party members appear to believe that a market economy is other than something to be suspected. The overwhelming view is that the market remains inherently unfair, capricious, rapacious and untrustworthy. Globalization is bad. So are big corporations.
The NDP remains wedded to modest redistribution of wealth and an expansion of the public sector, without apparently any interest in, or aptitude for, actually creating new wealth. Which is where the party has been for decades, intellectually, and which is among the reasons why the NDP remains politically stuck. It simply has nothing to say to millions of voters who are not already part of the little NDP world.
To its credit, the NDP under Jack Layton has taken more aggressive positions on environmental protection. The party is a good deal less divided between environmentalists and unionists than 10 or 20 years ago.
This greening, however, has not been enough to forestall the emergence of the Green Party as a contender for hard-core environmentalist votes. And in Quebec, of course, the NDP can make only painfully slow progress because the Bloc Québécois has subsumed part of the NDP's natural ideological constituency, including the Quebec trade union movement. (It didn't help that three prominent Quebec New Democrats quit the party just before the convention, grousing that Mr. Layton hadn't paid enough attention to the province.)
Squeezed in Quebec and threatened at the margin by the Greens, the NDP has been taking aim at the Liberals. The reasoning was simple, if flawed: The Liberals were in disarray and without a leader. So why not feast on their carcass? A kind of implicit arrangement between Conservatives and New Democrats saw them both trying to weaken the Liberals, so that Canadian politics could become a two-party, left-right, Conservative-NDP affair.
Except that the NDP made two mistakes. The first was to forget that the Conservatives were the government and that the NDP should have set itself up as the de facto official opposition instead of spending so much time whacking the actual Official Opposition. The second was to modify its own ideological nostrums so as to make the NDP more attractive to Liberal voters, something this convention manifestly will not do.
To take foreign policy, for example, it's hard to imagine the NDP reaching beyond its little world with resolutions praising Fidel Castro's Cuba and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, heaping abuse on Israel, opposing NAFTA, berating not just U.S. President George Bush but everything about U.S. society and policies, while of course insisting that Canada spend heaps more on foreign aid.
The party's call to withdraw Canadian troops from Afghanistan is presumably designed to be a “wedge issue” outside Quebec, pitting the NDP against the Conservatives and most Liberals, especially if the party is eventually led by Michael Ignatieff.
In Jack Layton's book, published not long before his first election campaign and written entirely by himself, not a single positive reference appeared regarding private enterprise or the free market — which is where the majority of Canadians earn their living. Nothing has apparently evolved since.
A party that cannot speak to people about improving the lot of their companies and industries, except by protection and subsidies, is a party that will remain stuck, intellectually and politically.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
09/09/06, Rex Murphy, Satire has forgotten its function, (Back).
We throw the term “satire” around rather too generously these days. Satire is a high art, but it is becoming a stand-in term for making obvious fun of a popular target. Jay Leno's tepid sarcasms, or Jon Stewart's smirks — especially when George Bush is their object — are class-clown stuff. Satire is an intelligent and imaginative reframing of experience, with the intent of detonating, through laughter and scorn, the prejudices of complacency or consensus.
It's a free upgrade when making simple fun of someone passes as satire. Could anything be more obvious or safe than mocking George Bush? He's a one-man malapropism factory, who's also the American president. Even Bill Maher and Al Franken, who have long confounded attitude with humour, can exploit that combination. The reach of sheer visceral contempt for Mr. Bush, inside America and outside, is a phenomenon of our time. Feeding that appetite is a cheap, apparently inexhaustible, industry, whose success depends on confirming its audience's predispositions, which may be brutally summarized as holding these self-evident truths: that George Bush is a second-rate idiot; an anti-intellectual daddy's boy; a warmongering, stereotypical Texan, who stole the White House and then carried America to war to please his buddies and fatten their bank accounts, and to distract the country from just how adolescent and inadequate he is.
Every joke that plays off this impression confirms the attitude of the audience that holds it. It flatters those large minds George Bush has such a small one.
Satire is not in the business of confirming preconceptions. Historically, it is in the service of exploding them. Animal Farm, George Orwell's dense satirical fable of socialist utopia, to take a classic illustration, was a red-hot iron thrown into the laps of all the conformist intellectuals, who nursed such naive fantasies about the Communist experiment from the days of Lenin's inaugural terror to the unimaginable butcheries of Stalin.
Today's satire has forgotten its function, or more precisely, reversed it. It confirms where it should challenge, seeks laughter as a bond rather than a challenge. We seem to have passed some invisible point in the discussion of public affairs where it was merely sufficient to register disagreement with the other side, and to set out arguments, with respect, against it. We ridicule rather than counter; vilify rather than contend.
All of which brings to mind the success of Michael Moore, the toast of every progressive south of the border and beyond, when he launched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was ludicrously labelled a documentary. Sure, and bubble gum is uranium.
F 9/11 was another predictable, self-pleased slash at the incompetence and cupidity of the Bush presidency, giving great cheer at the time to those many who despised it and its occupant. Its tools were the editing room knife, and full-bore attitude of its begetter.
In a previous, less-fevered time, an attack on a presidency or a government might have taken the satirical mode. But satire demands mind and imagination. Fahrenheit 9/11 was all assembly. Bush reads to elementary school kids — cut to the falling towers. Slice and juxtapose is a teenager's kit, not an artist's technique. With a good editor, and miles of footage to work with, Gandhi can be made to appear a mass murderer, and Hitler a pacifist birdwatcher.
F 9/11's real art was the art of gratifying already determined sensibilities. It exercised the age-old guile of courtiers everywhere: that of sycophancy to the monarch. With this difference: The monarch today is the like-minded audience, not the man in high office.
I suspect something of the same is on order in Death of a President, a film about to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival that offers the assassination of George Bush as its premise and central conceit. It is being called by its director a “fictional documentary,” which has as much meaning as a “fur-bearing fish” and inspires as much confidence as the obliging tag phrase from the Dan Rather saga — “fake but accurate.”
I read that it is “meant to inspire discussion” and it's “brave.” Throwing bricks from a lighted screen at Mr. Bush, à la Mr. Moore, or confecting a film on Mr. Bush's murder, these days has all the bravery of falling asleep after the ninth drink.
A really good attack on George Bush has not yet been done, mainly because resentment is being asked to do the task of imagination, and contempt the work of inspiration. The people who work him over are far too pleased with themselves to bypass self-congratulations over how superior they are to their target, to bring either wit or cogency to what they fondly conceive of as their mighty indictments.
Here's a good joke. In dispensing only scorn at George Bush, they infallibly satirize themselves.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
(Back)
09/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, The NDP won't stop preaching to the converted, (Source).
09/09/06, Rex Murphy, Satire has forgotten its function, (Source).
08/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, Spare us the NDP's mistaken moral crusades, (Back).
QUEBEC CITY — The New Democratic Party, largely because it has never known the responsibility and discipline of power, views a frequently immoral world through the prism of moral crusades. Like so many Canadians, the NDP wants Canada to do good in a bad world, whose miseries the party instinctively blames on the United States.
The Bush administration therefore provides an irresistible target, for reasons quite easy to understand, but the instinctive anti-Americanism ingrained in the NDP runs deeper than distaste for this administration.
Anti-Americanism reflects New Democrats' suspicion of market capitalism, transnational corporate structures, free trade, wealth and, most profoundly, the use of power in international affairs -- all of which are associated negatively with the United States.
Instinctively siding with underdogs, New Democrats dislike top dogs such as the United States, and its friends such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the subject of almost universal loathing within the NDP. This dislike now infects the NDP's attitudes toward Israel, a country for which the early generations of Canadian socialists showed sympathy and solidarity, in contrast to today's party preferences for Palestinians whose struggle ignites the NDP's moral fire.
Of course, many New Democrats will take umbrage at this description, insisting some of their best friends are Americans. But even the most casual perusal of NDP speeches or review of party positions, let alone a glance at the many resolutions presented at this weekend's convention, demonstrates the fatuousness of this denial.
Leader Jack Layton's call for the withdrawal of Canadian troops from Afghanistan is the latest manifestation of this instinct, since he justified his position, in part, by insisting that Canada was foolishly following "George Bush."
It is true that after 9/11 -- the senior perpetrators of which had lived and thrived in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime -- the United States (and others) attacked Afghanistan to replace the regime.
Subsequently, seven United Nations resolutions (in contrast to the Iraq invasion) authorized the creation of a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, whose leaders since the beginning have come from Britain, Turkey, Germany, Canada, France and Italy. Normally, the NDP insists on UN approval for any international force projection, but once ISAF began to fight, it became part of U.S. war-making and therefore illegitimate for the NDP. Instead of stopping the Taliban from returning to power, as the UN wanted, the NDP stance was to negotiate with the Taliban -- over what, precisely, remained unclear.
Meanwhile, Mr. Layton proposed that Canadian forces take the lead in Darfur, without specifying how the African Union, which does not want NATO forces there, could be otherwise persuaded -- to say nothing of the Sudanese government.
But Darfur had taken on the allure of a moral crusade, more compelling apparently than that of the plight of ordinary Afghans under the Taliban, and so the ever-changing moral compass of the NDP swung toward Africa, the theory being that in Darfur Canadian soldiers would be keeping the peace rather than making war.
It was never clear, of course, just how the peace could be kept in Darfur without the application of force against marauding gangs who, with the encouragement of the government in Khartoum, murder, maim and rape. Nor was it clear how the unwanted Canadians would implant themselves in a place they knew next-to-nothing about, at the head of a force few other countries wished to join.
But the NDP, unschooled in the realpolitik of the world and besotted by anti-Americanism, has sought (with some success) to position itself domestically as the custodian of Canada's international virtue, however exaggerated that virtue might be and however overwrought it often appears in the eyes of the world.
Foreign policy is, of course, an extension of domestic politics. The call to leave Afghanistan, the party hopes, will fall on especially receptive ears in Quebec, where anti-Americanism is rife on the political left and in nationalist circles, and where all military commitments are regarded with inherent suspicion.
The other day, one of the old lions of the Parti Québécois, Jacques Brassard, penned an article imploring Quebec separatists to drop their anti-American, anti-Israel attitudes and offer a more balanced, and therefore a more realistic, view of the world.
It's too bad no NDP elder statesman would echo similar sentiments. Chances are, sadly, that such a call would be just as ignored in the NDP as Mr. Brassard's in the Bloc Québécois.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
09/09/06, Jeffrey Simpson, The NDP won't stop preaching to the converted, (Back).
QUEBEC CITY — The explicit aspiration of the New Democratic Party for this weekend's convention was to make the party appear “ready to govern” or at least to become the “real opposition.”
The convention looks set to fail on both counts, not because the convention lacked effective organization, but because the NDP is intellectually stuck.
The NDP has its world — 15 to 18 per cent of the Canadian electorate — but, apparently, it cannot look beyond that world to a bigger, broader coalition.
The departure this week of Paul Summerville illustrates one reason why, a reason reinforced in spades at the convention. A banker, Mr. Summerville decided to run in Toronto for the party in the last election. He was held aloft like a political trophy by the NDP by way of illustrating that the party accepted the market economy.
Mr. Summerville has now left, attracted instead by Bob Rae, a Liberal leadership candidate. Mr. Summerville, therefore, follows former New Democrat politicians and activists such as Ujjal Dosanjh, Chris Axworthy, Janice MacKinnon and, of course, Mr. Rae, himself, all of whom formally or quietly moved away from the party because they could not abide its ideological rigidities.
It's revealing, if somewhat unfair, to judge a party by resolutions that riding associations submit to a convention. Every party has wacko elements. Drafting resolutions to change the world at some sparsely attended mid-winter constituency meeting of two dozen activists is the ultimate in unchecked political fantasy.
Nonetheless, looking through hundreds of resolutions gives a broad reflection of where party members want to go, how they see the world and what their priorities are. No wonder Mr. Summerville left.
Nowhere in the resolutions do party members appear to believe that a market economy is other than something to be suspected. The overwhelming view is that the market remains inherently unfair, capricious, rapacious and untrustworthy. Globalization is bad. So are big corporations.
The NDP remains wedded to modest redistribution of wealth and an expansion of the public sector, without apparently any interest in, or aptitude for, actually creating new wealth. Which is where the party has been for decades, intellectually, and which is among the reasons why the NDP remains politically stuck. It simply has nothing to say to millions of voters who are not already part of the little NDP world.
To its credit, the NDP under Jack Layton has taken more aggressive positions on environmental protection. The party is a good deal less divided between environmentalists and unionists than 10 or 20 years ago.
This greening, however, has not been enough to forestall the emergence of the Green Party as a contender for hard-core environmentalist votes. And in Quebec, of course, the NDP can make only painfully slow progress because the Bloc Québécois has subsumed part of the NDP's natural ideological constituency, including the Quebec trade union movement. (It didn't help that three prominent Quebec New Democrats quit the party just before the convention, grousing that Mr. Layton hadn't paid enough attention to the province.)
Squeezed in Quebec and threatened at the margin by the Greens, the NDP has been taking aim at the Liberals. The reasoning was simple, if flawed: The Liberals were in disarray and without a leader. So why not feast on their carcass? A kind of implicit arrangement between Conservatives and New Democrats saw them both trying to weaken the Liberals, so that Canadian politics could become a two-party, left-right, Conservative-NDP affair.
Except that the NDP made two mistakes. The first was to forget that the Conservatives were the government and that the NDP should have set itself up as the de facto official opposition instead of spending so much time whacking the actual Official Opposition. The second was to modify its own ideological nostrums so as to make the NDP more attractive to Liberal voters, something this convention manifestly will not do.
To take foreign policy, for example, it's hard to imagine the NDP reaching beyond its little world with resolutions praising Fidel Castro's Cuba and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, heaping abuse on Israel, opposing NAFTA, berating not just U.S. President George Bush but everything about U.S. society and policies, while of course insisting that Canada spend heaps more on foreign aid.
The party's call to withdraw Canadian troops from Afghanistan is presumably designed to be a “wedge issue” outside Quebec, pitting the NDP against the Conservatives and most Liberals, especially if the party is eventually led by Michael Ignatieff.
In Jack Layton's book, published not long before his first election campaign and written entirely by himself, not a single positive reference appeared regarding private enterprise or the free market — which is where the majority of Canadians earn their living. Nothing has apparently evolved since.
A party that cannot speak to people about improving the lot of their companies and industries, except by protection and subsidies, is a party that will remain stuck, intellectually and politically.
jsimpson@globeandmail.com
09/09/06, Rex Murphy, Satire has forgotten its function, (Back).
We throw the term “satire” around rather too generously these days. Satire is a high art, but it is becoming a stand-in term for making obvious fun of a popular target. Jay Leno's tepid sarcasms, or Jon Stewart's smirks — especially when George Bush is their object — are class-clown stuff. Satire is an intelligent and imaginative reframing of experience, with the intent of detonating, through laughter and scorn, the prejudices of complacency or consensus.
It's a free upgrade when making simple fun of someone passes as satire. Could anything be more obvious or safe than mocking George Bush? He's a one-man malapropism factory, who's also the American president. Even Bill Maher and Al Franken, who have long confounded attitude with humour, can exploit that combination. The reach of sheer visceral contempt for Mr. Bush, inside America and outside, is a phenomenon of our time. Feeding that appetite is a cheap, apparently inexhaustible, industry, whose success depends on confirming its audience's predispositions, which may be brutally summarized as holding these self-evident truths: that George Bush is a second-rate idiot; an anti-intellectual daddy's boy; a warmongering, stereotypical Texan, who stole the White House and then carried America to war to please his buddies and fatten their bank accounts, and to distract the country from just how adolescent and inadequate he is.
Every joke that plays off this impression confirms the attitude of the audience that holds it. It flatters those large minds George Bush has such a small one.
Satire is not in the business of confirming preconceptions. Historically, it is in the service of exploding them. Animal Farm, George Orwell's dense satirical fable of socialist utopia, to take a classic illustration, was a red-hot iron thrown into the laps of all the conformist intellectuals, who nursed such naive fantasies about the Communist experiment from the days of Lenin's inaugural terror to the unimaginable butcheries of Stalin.
Today's satire has forgotten its function, or more precisely, reversed it. It confirms where it should challenge, seeks laughter as a bond rather than a challenge. We seem to have passed some invisible point in the discussion of public affairs where it was merely sufficient to register disagreement with the other side, and to set out arguments, with respect, against it. We ridicule rather than counter; vilify rather than contend.
All of which brings to mind the success of Michael Moore, the toast of every progressive south of the border and beyond, when he launched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was ludicrously labelled a documentary. Sure, and bubble gum is uranium.
F 9/11 was another predictable, self-pleased slash at the incompetence and cupidity of the Bush presidency, giving great cheer at the time to those many who despised it and its occupant. Its tools were the editing room knife, and full-bore attitude of its begetter.
In a previous, less-fevered time, an attack on a presidency or a government might have taken the satirical mode. But satire demands mind and imagination. Fahrenheit 9/11 was all assembly. Bush reads to elementary school kids — cut to the falling towers. Slice and juxtapose is a teenager's kit, not an artist's technique. With a good editor, and miles of footage to work with, Gandhi can be made to appear a mass murderer, and Hitler a pacifist birdwatcher.
F 9/11's real art was the art of gratifying already determined sensibilities. It exercised the age-old guile of courtiers everywhere: that of sycophancy to the monarch. With this difference: The monarch today is the like-minded audience, not the man in high office.
I suspect something of the same is on order in Death of a President, a film about to debut at the Toronto International Film Festival that offers the assassination of George Bush as its premise and central conceit. It is being called by its director a “fictional documentary,” which has as much meaning as a “fur-bearing fish” and inspires as much confidence as the obliging tag phrase from the Dan Rather saga — “fake but accurate.”
I read that it is “meant to inspire discussion” and it's “brave.” Throwing bricks from a lighted screen at Mr. Bush, à la Mr. Moore, or confecting a film on Mr. Bush's murder, these days has all the bravery of falling asleep after the ninth drink.
A really good attack on George Bush has not yet been done, mainly because resentment is being asked to do the task of imagination, and contempt the work of inspiration. The people who work him over are far too pleased with themselves to bypass self-congratulations over how superior they are to their target, to bring either wit or cogency to what they fondly conceive of as their mighty indictments.
Here's a good joke. In dispensing only scorn at George Bush, they infallibly satirize themselves.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
(Back)
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