The WordPress/JetPack writing prompt for today is:
What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?
Why does government exist? It’s a deep question, easily due a full textbook. This is a blog post. If one assumes that government exists to serve the people, you may be called naive. But let’s start from that and look at how democracy has evolved at the civic and national levels.
The first level of a democracy is what I’ll call the “Service” stage. This is where taxes get use to build schools, roads, found fire departments and police departments. Sewage systems, water treatment, etc. get accounted for, development gets planned and hopefully built.
Eventually, a new layer gets added on top of this, the “Performance” level. This is where we started to see capitalism invading politics. Lobbyists start influencing politicians. Performatively, things are still being done ‘for the people’ but who gets to do them, at what level of profit, and which ‘people’ get prioritized is being affected by money.
It still looks kind of like a democracy where the voters have influence, but popular influence is waning.
The supposed backlash to performative politics, is grievance politics. “Supposed” is a key word. The lobbyists and influencers are still there, but the anger that’s been building towards them needs to get redirected.
This is when politics becomes about ‘othering’, finding some group within the community who can be either held to blame, to be the approved target of growing anger. This is the American Tea Party, the “Obama is a Kenyan”
Fast forward a decade or two and we have the latest (last?) stage of democracy, revenge. This is Donald Trump, naming enemies and weaponizing the government to hurt them. it’s a natural
extension of grievance politics: harness that grievance and use it to entrench a power structure that subverts democracy.
Is there a stage after Revenge? Well, the South African model of moving beyond apartheid may offer a path. But theTruth and Reconciliation Commission can only be based on a shared understanding of the facts, and that doesn’t exist in the US any more. I don’t know if the South African system was equally bifurcated into two or more realities, it may well have been (I only lived there for three years, after apartheid).
Let’s call this stage Reset and hope it somehow happens in the US.
In the Canadian context, Mark Carney seems to be trying for a Service level of government, but there are Performative elements, and given his background as an economist, his actions seem centered around the idea that the government will protect the businesses and the businesses will protect the consumers. This is textbook trickle-down capitalism, not democracy.
Even still, seeing someone working so hard to protect and improve Canada is refreshing.
But here in Canada, we also have our grievance politics. Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, used to be the poster child for that kind of politics, but with the rise of threats from Donald Trump, he’s pivoted towards “Team Canada.”
So the mantle of grievance has been taken up by Pierre Poilievre, leader of the federal opposition. This is a man who has never held a job outside of government, has never proposed a single law, and who has failed to submit to the most basic security clearance for members of parliament.
He isn’t a sincere person. He lies a lot, much like Trump. Someone pointed out that he had a ‘tell,’ a sign that he was lying: He would touch his glasses before he spoke his prepared lie. Having been caught, what did he do? He stopped wearing glasses.
Pierre Poilievre isn’t yet into revenge politics, mostly, I think, because he’s ever been allowed any real power.
What would improve my city the most? A return to democracy as a service to the people.