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?"