Out in Left-Centre Field

Who dares disturb my slumber?[/giantvoice]

Oh, it's an NDP leadership race. Just kidding -- I have been following it for a while now.

For starters, I wish it was shorter. The race is depriving the party of its best front-benchers right when the NDP needs to be working flat-out to cement their newfound gains. But instead, we get a campaign so long that the media are only paying attention to the polls showing NDP slippage in Quebec (among, yes, a few other regions).

Hilariously, the mass media still don't know how to make heads or tails of the federal scene in Canada. The mentality of "only two parties can ever win" has been so prevalent for so long that to contemplate the mere possibility that change might be real (gasp!) is something akin to an unspeakable sin. The glass ceiling has been shattered and decisively so. Get used to it.

And yet, at the same time, those polls make a valid point: the next leader of the NDP has to be up to the task of not only shoring up the gains the party has made, but also growing beyond to reach out to people who have never voted in their favour. That will undoubtedly leave some hard-liners unhappy, but then, no one can ever have it all at the expense of everyone else -- that is the essence of both compromise and democracy.

Staying put, playing it safe, just won't cut it. The status quo is not what the NDP is about -- if that's what you truly want, go vote Liberal. The former dream about the future; the latter obsess about the past.

"Aha!", but you say, "they could just merge and have a little bit of both! They're both leftist parties anyway, right? What's the big deal?"

I can say it once, I can say it a thousand times: it's just not that simple.

Fundamentally, the NDP and the Liberals just aren't that close in terms of principles, values and ideology. To most NDPers, the Liberals aren't even left of centre at all. Most Liberals don't consider their party to be left of centre (or right of it), sometimes giving their stance the oxymoronic appellation of "radical centrism" or the "radical middle". There's nothing radical about the Liberals; there hasn't been for decades. Long story short: we don't want to be them, and they don't want to be us.

For much of the 1990s -- the decade I grew up and first met politics -- the Liberals made an art out of campaigning from the left and governing from the right. They'd talk a good game about government programs and social stability, and routinely garner large numbers of disenchanted, demoralized NDP-leaning voters to swell their majorities. Then, when it came time to govern again, they'd turn around and go right back to the cutting corporate taxes and slashing provincial transfers. They were Tories in all but name -- and in fact were gladly supported by the Reform Party for adopting their fiscal policies. It was both predictable and utterly transparent.

It's a scene NDPers have watched time and time again: the Liberal Party, stampeding otherwise NDP-leaning voters into inflating Liberal victories, casting themselves as the righteous guardians of sanity against the Conservative (EVIL!) and NDP (COMMUNISTS!) bogeymen. It kept working, and the Liberals got gradually more complacent until the voting public finally got wise to their act and shifted to more credible rivals on both the right and the left.

And now, it is the Liberals who want the NDP's compassion. There's a proposal going around, endorsed in particular by the otherwise ingenious Nathan Cullen, that in the absence of an actual merger, the NDP and Liberals should agree to not compete against each other in ridings across the country so as to unite the "progressive vote" and, theoretically, unseat the greater enemy of Stephen Harper's Conservative government.

First of all, and more simply, this ignores the possibility that left/centre votes might not readily transfer to one party or the other. More hard-line partisan voters might be so butthurt that (1) they might not vote at all, (2) they might vote for some random fringe candidate, or (3) they could hop straight to the Conservatives in revenge for "their" candidate not getting in.

(I would know; in Ontario's 2007 provincial election, I voted for the local PC candidate because the NDPer sucked. I hopped right over the Liberals because, despite the media frenzy over the "religious school funding" issue, John Tory and his local candidate seemed like reasonable people.)

Secondly, what's worse, this amounts to basically handing the Liberals an easy way to sneak up and take the NDP down from behind. The NDP just won Opposition eight short months ago. Their leader promptly died, they still have yet to solidify those gains, and every new federal poll accompanies a column crowing about their supposedly inevitable fall back to "natural" third-party status. And now you're asking them to freely hand that advantage back to the Liberals, who beat them down, demoralized them, and laughed and spat in their face for the better part of a century? It goes against any rational instinct -- and parties have never won by being soft to those who would harm them.

I mean, I'd love to be friends and have everything be happy and roses, but isn't that asking a bit way, way too much too soon?

I know that we need to kick the win-at-all-costs, beat-'em-when-they're-down philosophy that has gradually and incessantly been rotting our politics from the inside out. (Don't even get me started on the fun in the USA.) It is critical that we must restore decency and openness and trust to politics in order to regain the confidence and engagement of the public.

Two parties merging or not competing is not going to do that. As human beings, we can do our best to forgive what others have done, but there is no way we can forget. Decades of antipathy and malfeasance cannot vanish overnight. The idea is admirable, but in practice, the time has not yet come.

And it takes time to build trust. I'm not going to pretend the NDP haven't been jerks to the Liberals on countless occasions -- so in that vein, I would readily imagine there are many Liberals who feel as I do (a strange manifestation of cooperation, but still). To start, let's make a commitment to be at least nice to each other and see how it goes from there. One day, we might all be ready.

~~~~~

And, in a highly tangential addendum, from the ranks of the "Evil Overlord List":

#6) I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.

#24) I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line "No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!" (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

#48) I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus, if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.