Politics

[jsburbidge]

Recent coverage has shown that the mad, panicked response of last Friday by the Ontario PCs to the increasing COVID numbers was not an aversion to more deaths, nor a belated reaction to the (ignored) advice from their advisory panel, nor even (as I thought) a response to the ICU crisis. It was a reaction to increasing general public negative reaction to the weak response of the government to the third wave of the pandemic and, as such, pure classical politics.

 

It may become a classic example of the problems of "Something must be done; this is something; therefore it must be done" thinking, and likewise of the risks of confusing a demand for more action with a demand for effective action. Though they did not have "something" to hand; they had to make it up.

 

The Ford PCs continue to show the same traits which made them so beloved before the pandemic: action before thought, and singing from the same songsheet to a degree which leads one to imagine that DoFo has perfected brainwashing. These are not the traits of an enduring political dynasty.

 

Though political they most assuredly are: they respond as politicians, to public opinion, and not, as a government, to public need.

 

Pitt, or Peel, or even Gladstone, thought of politics as something which had to be dealt with to get around to one's real aim, which was that of governing. Our current leaders never get far enough away from politics to govern.

 

We can at least be glad we do not live in Alberta. At last report, Kenney, who is even more resolute than Ford in his unwillingness to sacrifice the interests of the rich^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H corporations to the public need, is facing an internal party revolt by those who feel that he has unduly restricted their freedoms.

 

The US now has a moderately sane leader confronting a gridlocked legislature and a set of state governments which range between the effective and the batshit crazy. The UK has a clever buffoon with no principles and no stability as a leader facing a crumbling Union.

 

"Politics", in the sense that the word has had since some time in the early 20th Century (at least), has failed: not only on COVID, but on the climate crisis, and even on such simple matters as security for the majority of citizens. Churchill's dictum may still apply - authoritarian regimes may have dealt with COVID better but are not otherwise much more competent, and even their range of effectiveness in the pandemic is so great that I at least am inclined to link the success of many East Asian regimes to their cultures rather than their governments. If authoritarian traits aligned with effectiveness in dealing with crises, Russia would be in much better shape. But some sort of third option looks increasingly necessary.

 

A sane electorate would never have elected Ford, or Johnson, or Trump, or Bolsonaro. It may almost be time to consider the actual utility, under a transformation, of Brecht's ironic suggestion:
 

 

Wäre es da

Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung

Löste das Volk auf und

Wählte ein anderes?

 

If "political" thought is creating a breakdown, perhaps we need to think, instead of political response, of a social, artistic, and literary response. Human nature is malleable (though maybe not as malleable as Leary and Wilson thought): addressing how people think may, in the end, be our best response to the crisis of government which confronts us. We need another population, not simply a set of changes of government.

Comments

[graydon]

Anglosphere political thought is an outgrowth the Looting Spree/Carbon Binge; it's about victory and control and loot distribution. (Mammonites are the heresy that says "distribution? why? I want it all for me.")

Only we know today that you can have success or control; it's an exclusive or, you can't have both.

My impression is that the Taiwanese and Singaporeans and the Vietnamese all governed effectively. And it's really hard to suppose that Vietnamese or the PRC aren't more competent than the current government of Canada. (Harder circumstances, better results.)

So, yeah, I'm definitely on Team Not-This-nor-That-Either, but effective authoritarianism is a thing. There's nothing fundamental that prevents that from happening.

Government by Feels, there is something fundamental that prevents that from happening. And to me it seems like that's the core problem with governance, but we got there because of loot concentration. I continue to believe that nothing we can do will fix politics until we've instituted starkly egalitarian income and asset caps.

[graydon]

Thinking about this some more, I don't think the nominal mechanism of government matters.

It's a split between extirpate the disease and minimize the cost ("re-open as soon as possible", etc. All the approaches trying to return everything to normal as quickly as possible.)

Minimize the cost is a mistake; it's an approach that axiomatically supposes there's a finite quantity of disease. (There's a lot else wrong with it, but that's the fundamental and unrecoverable error.)

So the question might be, "what's the difference in thinking that leads to extirpate the disease versus minimize the cost?"

[dewline]

The "thinking" that's hobbling us is the kind that believes that extirpating the disease is more expensive than the supposedly valid alternative. They're wrong. Extirpating the disease is what minimizes the cost of the disease.

[graydon]

It's the difference between trying to minimize the displacement in the cost direction on the cost-time graph and trying to minimize the area under the "expenses due to plague" entry in the cost-time graph.

I keep thinking that this is the simplest thing in the world, but apparently not.

[jsburbidge]

Turn it a quarter-turn and "minimize the cost" comes out as "to avoid my being inconvenienced, people will just have to die".

(COVID is not the only example of this. Urban speed limits higher than 30kph are another example. Or not sufficiently reducing air pollution because people with asthma don't count.)

[graydon]

Minimize the cost (to me, and the other important people) is certainly the dominant construction of cost, yeah.

There's a view that common law, torts, and capitalism would all work if only all the costs were on the books. (It still wouldn't; you can't run a system on nothing but feedback.) It remains instructive to look at what costs are ignored and what costs are minimized or suppressed.

It looks to me as though you can only think like that if you think the system is inherently invincible and thus permanent. Which might be another way to slice the successful versus unsuccessful public health responses; if you know it can fail, you react differently.

[jsburbidge]

"There's a view that common law, torts, and capitalism would all work if only all the costs were on the books."

Really, really, no, as regards tort law. But that's going to require a post on its own, I think. (Short form: the historical constraints on tort law are such as to make "work" a concept so splintered and nebulous as to be meaningless. I have lots of memories of first year torts and going "this makes historical but no conceptual sense", and I had Makuch rather than Weinrib so there was no argument about principles at any meaningful level in class.)

As another side observation: this morning's Star article indicates that the immediate problem is both worse and better than it might appear. Better, because the problems do not seem to spring from Ford's personal distaste for following the recommendations of his advisors. But the same characteristics which make him willing to be "flexible" (aka "blown about on every wind of vain doctrine" or "being a populist") -- his reactions to the reactions of other people meant that he wasn't willing to push things through against cabinet opposition. Worse, because the opposition to effective measures is widespread through the rural part of the Conservative cabinet (never mind caucus) and the cabinet (and Ford) were unwilling to move forward on measures which they did not unanimously support; and widespread resistance is worse than the foibles of one person. (This may also explain why it's taking the government so long to go from announcing that they will be doing "something" on sick leave to actually announcing a structure for it (you can do that before the details are drafted): it's probably treading on too many cabinet members' corns.)

[graydon]

Oh, I absolutely do not share that view!

(But I can remember very earnest argument that it would have handled issues like water pollution without legislation if it had been permitted to proceed back in the late 19th century.)

Dougie can't handle peer power relationships, lacks charisma, lacks drive, and generally wants people to like him, all terrible weaknesses in a premier. The rural MPs are generally anti-science and using moral reasoning and likely sincerely believe they're safe because they're white and moral, unlike those degenerates in the cities.

Which means I expect "sick leave" to just not go anywhere; the Ontario conservatives really don't want it, and the will to make them take it isn't there. (The skill isn't, either.)

I find myself starting to wonder just how much more of this kind of abject failure the confederal system can take.

[jsburbidge]

"But I can remember very earnest argument that it would have handled issues like water pollution without legislation if it had been permitted to proceed back in the late 19th century."

Technically true, given the nature of riparian rights.

In practice, no. The evidence is what get referred to as "the railway cases", mainly in England, a few in Canada, where common-law judges ruling in common-law nuisance suits regarding nuisances created by the construction of railways used reasoning which simply did not hold up to dismiss such suits. The overall view that extending the railways was important overrode any application of the law even in clear cases. (These were mid-19th Century.)

Common-law remedies did in principle reduce the number of externalities to activity such as building factories and railways, but they were not a sophisticated way of doing so even if they had been applied. As it actually happened, they were either restricted by legislation or simply ignored, until the later (1930s) expansion of tort law to cover liability for provision of goods and services (Donoghue v. Stevenson). But that's a matter for a tort law post.