Reply #1: weirdly [View All]

[iverglas]

I find Frum's characterization of the Liberal Party to be pretty bang on.

I do tend to disagree with his conclusions. It seems to me that the Liberal Party has just been more successful at what every right-wing party in the world would love to be able to do. Hold onto power, run the show, and secure the spoils for themselves. They, not the more extremist manifestations of the right wing, are the modern ones. And the current scandal is an example of them blowing it (and obviously still small potatoes compared to things, oh, the contracts relating to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which Frum of course doesn't include in his math).

Perhaps this is because the stakes in Canada are lower than in the US, and so everybody has been willing to settle for less than the current Republican mob in the US wants to amass, for instance. Perhaps the Liberals just have a better understanding of the fact that people really can't be kept impoverished and brutalized forever, and that stability is more useful than more millions of dollars, in the long run. They know it is in their interests to maintain a certain level of respect for other people's interests, in their policies.

Now that they've blown it, we might all suffer. Frankly, I don't have a lot of problem with "brokerage parties" in the current/local stage of human development, i.e. capitalist liberal democracy -- which, of course, I do not regard as "the end of history". Relatively prosperous stability with freedom is likely a lot more conducive to human progress than a cycle of exploitation/oppression and revolution.

Canadian society, methinks, has been evolving fairly nicely for quite a while, taking a long and broad view of it. Nobody, not even the Liberal Party, can stop evolution and progress. For now, they've given us as much prosperous stability and freedom as is in their interests, and either they evolve with society as it demands more, or they lose power. Or they fuck up and the resulting vacuum might be filled by something that should have been an ugly anachronism.

Don't get me wrong. I still despise Liberals. But I also recognize that Canadian society as a whole, and various of its members, are still not completely evolved (as if such a thing were possible), and are not prepared to do what has to be done to eliminate the very real exploitation and oppression that exist. I can't make it happen, any more than Democrats in the US could make people vote for Kerry, no matter how stupid and evil it plainly was to vote for Bush. So I really do wish the Liberals hadn't fucked up quite so badly this time. The results could be very nasty, since any voters who didn't already know what scum Liberals are obviously aren't equipped to deal with that knowledge now that they have it. ;)

The one thing that people will not stand for in their leaders is corruption. This is true throughout human history and geography. The trick that leaders who want to exploit people have to remember is to keep that veneer of necessity and morality on their corruption -- keep the people believing that it's for their own good that they pump their labour into the economy for someone else's benefit, that it's only fair that the owners of the capital reap that benefit.

It's pretty hard to persuade anybody that the profits reaped in the current spot of bother did anybody any good except Liberals, or were in any way a fair return on investment. The short-term greed of some stupid people obviously triumphed over the long-term benefits that intelligent exploiters keep their eyes fixed on. As so often happens.