Because YOU demanded it!

Just like YOU demanded the Clone Saga!

…is this article suggesting that the natural home of hippies is the Tea Party.

No, really. Among the article’s highlights:

– taking an anti-war poster with “Great Society” on it, the point of which was that Johnson’s rhetoric about the Great Society were belied by his actions in Vietnam, and arguing that posters like this meant that hippies actually hated government anti-poverty programs and civil rights

– arguing that conservatives believe that humans are inherently flawed and selfish, just like hippies do

– saying that hippies rejected “artificially constructed collectivist utopias,” which is about as a good a four-word definition of the commune movement as one could manage

– suggesting that the reason Democrats lost in 1968 is because hippies all voted for Richard Nixon

– further arguing that Democrats protesting the 1968 Democratic convention and not the Republican convention is proof of this (conveniently ignoring that in 1972 hippies protested the Republican convention, but whatever, that’s four whole years later)

– glossing over the fact that although both hippies and Tea Partiers believe in “accepting the natural order of things,” that their respective definitions of what that might actually be are wildly divergent

– and, of course, a political spectrum diagram that tells us exactly where “bums” and “trustafarian anarchists” lie on the political spectrum (although it does leave out “those damn kids listening to their Black Eyed Peas” and “my neighbor whose dog keeps digging up my azaleas” on the author’s list of personal bugbears, although I am sure they are both evil commies)

Seriously, folks. This thing is a work of art.

I’m almost getting sick of writing about Rob Ford and his demented, dishonest mayoral campaign, but what the hell, really.

Even non-Torontonians should see that Youtube. It’s amazingly bad. Watch it, and then realize that Ford is the frontrunner in an election for one of the largest governments in Canada.

So Toronto’s mayoral candidates had their seven billionth debate last night and, as always, I was watching.

Rosie DiManno thought today was a great day to write an anti-mosque column. That made it a great day for me to mock her.

I was watching some clips of ‘The Daily Show’ today, about Glenn Beck and his plan to hold a rally on the anniversary of, and at the site of, Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. For those of you not paying attention to American politics, this is causing a tiny bit of controversy, on account of how Beck is an unapologetic racist who is espousing philosophies that would make the non-violent King want to punch him in the crotch until his balls implode.

But here’s the thing: Beck and his supporters insist that he’s not racist at all, apologetically or otherwise. They might even pop up in this very comments section to do so. They insist that they’re all good, kind-hearted people who are just espousing principles of common decency and humanity, and the Evil Lib’ruls are trying to shut them up by making baseless, unfounded claims of racism that just happen to be supported by easily misunderstood video evidence.

They’re lying, of course. We know they’re lying, because we have the aforementioned video evidence. They know they’re lying, because there’s not a single person in the world who could be so utterly lacking in self-awareness and basic intelligence as to hold a giant rally for white conservatives on the anniversary of a famous civil rights speech, in the exact same place that speech was held, and not notice that there might be some sort of problem. Beck is being totally disingenuous and everybody knows it including himself, but Beck, like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Malkin, and Ann Coulter, simply refuse to admit that they’re being disingenuous. They have decided that as long as they’re consistent in their denials, the truth of what they’re denying simply doesn’t matter.

And that sounded familiar to me, as I was thinking about how to describe the phenomenon for this column, and I finally remembered this post from the excellent blog, Kung Fu Monkey. (Please read it, I spent a long time looking through the archives for it. Then I got smart and just googled the keywords. But I digress…) What he describes there is the problem of shamelessness, and he describes it perfectly. Glenn Beck has no sense of shame. He doesn’t see any problem with lying, and confronting him on his lies is no use, because he will simply continue to lie. You cannot shame the man into admitting that he’s a terrible person, because he’s such a terrible person that he doesn’t care that he’s lying about being terrible. And he’s got a national TV show.

Now obviously, this isn’t going to last forever. Most of Beck’s sponsors do have a sense of shame, or at least can put a dollar amount on exactly how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to support a shameless man, and they’re dropping his show in droves. And the remaining ones are being indicted for fraud, because while there are no laws about shamelessly lying on a national television program, there are laws about false advertising, and coincidentally most of the people still selling ad space on Beck’s show are turning out to be fraudsters. But when Beck goes away, someone else will take his place, because these guys have figured out the loophole in the system. Just deny it all. Even if you know you’re lying, even if they know you’re lying, deny it all. You’re not breaking any laws. The only way they can punish you is with social contempt, and you’re already beneath that.

John Rogers hit it perfectly. These guys have found the exploit that allows them to game the system of civilized conduct. That’s why irony is dead: Stephen Colbert and his fellow comedians are trying to make an absurd statement in a serious way, but all they can ever hope to do is match the stuff Glenn Beck is trying to say for real. You can’t even make fun of these guys, because they’re crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams. All you can really do is hope that people get smart enough to see through their bullshit, and that’s a pipe dream.

Someone broke human behavior. We need a patch.

So far too many people have asked me to do a post about the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and using that phrase just makes me feel irritated because it’s not at ground zero and it’s not a mosque, but using the phrase at least means everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Here’s my problem: I don’t know what there is left to write about. The right people have already pretty much covered every inch of this issue and why it’s a non-troversy. People have talked about how the “mosque” is in fact a community centre with a prayer room, and how if you want to call it a mosque then by the same logic the Pentagon is a mosque. People have talked about how Feisal Abdul Rauf really isn’t anything but a moderate, peaceful scholar and how his “ties” to radical Islamic movements have been overdramatized or fictionalized. People have talked about how this wasn’t a big deal to anybody until the usual right-wing media suspects decided to gin it up into a big deal months after the fact. People have talked about how other people who should frankly know better (I’m looking at you, Howard Dean) are acting as apologists for bigots. And of course, people have talked about how this is a basic issue of civil rights, and how suggesting that all Muslims have to be “sensitive” post-9/11 is the worst kind of assigning of collective guilt, something that should generally be anathema to anybody living in a modern liberal democracy.

And none of it really matters, because “Muslim” is the new “nigger.” Except in a way it’s kind of worse, because the (almost entirely white) people screaming about Muslims nowadays are the ones who either still use the word or who are the ones who never really understood why it was bad in the first place. Everybody knows at least one white person who doesn’t understand why black people get to use the N-word and why white people can’t; to them, the word being bad is completely understandable. Taboo behaviour is nothing new, after all, and they can understand a new type of taboo behaviour, but what they don’t understand is that the reason for the taboo isn’t because the word itself is bad; after all, it’s just a word. “Nigger” is taboo because when someone who isn’t black uses it, it’s one-word shorthand for “you are less human than me based on the colour of your skin.” Which is why black people can use it, because when one black person says it to another, they’re both black and that shorthand doesn’t apply.

If you don’t understand that – or if you don’t care – then you’re not really going to be concerned about the fact that there are many different types of Muslims and the gigantic majority of them just want to live in peace like everybody else, because the idea of living post-racially (as best anybody can; we all have our inherent biases to overcome) is one that requires introspection and an inquisitive mind. Neither of these traits has been terribly evident in the mosque protesters.

Two things happened to me recently that dovetailed in an odd way: first, I broke my arm in a bicycle accident; second, I picked up volumes 1-6 of Marvel’s Essential X-Men books for a very reasonable price. The upshot of the first event was that I had to have a metal plate and screws attached to hold the broken bone together, with the result that when I travel by air (as I do fairly often for my job) I now have to budget an extra half-hour or so at the airport to explain that, yes, it’s the metal plate in my arm that’s setting off the metal detector. Because I am a smartass, it immediately occurred to me that if I were a suicide bomber what I really ought to do is get a sympathetic doctor to implant a bomb in my arm in such a way that it looked like an orthopedic plate; then I could have a good laugh with the security people, get on the plane and blow it up at my leisure. (I had a similar thought back when they were hunting Saddam Hussein and there was a story about a guy in southern Iraq who was always being mistaken for him; what Hussein should have done, I thought, was pretend to be that guy — “Yeah, I get that all the time.”)

Which brings us to the X-Men, because I hadn’t realized until I read from Giant-Size X-Men #1 to around issue 200 all in a row just how much the whole “persecuted mutants” business was Claremont’s idea. (And by the way, how hard is it to imagine that back in the day the Defenders got four Giant-Size specials, while the X-Men only got one?) Sure, the original run had the Sentinels, but their creator was portrayed as a basically crazy guy, not a garden-variety bigot; more to the point, there was little sense in the original comics that the average man on the street was anti-mutant. Nor is that the case in the early issues of Claremont’s run: in their very first adventure they’re called to defend Cheyenne Mountain in place of the Avengers (the general in charge remarks that he doesn’t trust them, but he still lets them go to it) and a few issues later a fairly big deal is made out of just how high Professor X’s security clearance is, the upshot of both being that the X-Men are still very much a part of the establishment. (When Cyclops identifies himself to the general his dialogue could just as easily come from Captain America.) For some time after that the X-Men have pretty generic superhero adventures, encountering demons, aliens and leprechauns (don’t ask; for the love of God, don’t ask) until the storyline that forms the basis of the whole rest of Claremont’s run, the justly famous “Days of Future Past.” (As an aside, Claremont clearly just loved to sound profound by putting antonyms together; for a less successful example, see “Lifedeath.”) Though what most people remember from that story is the scenes of various X-Men being killed, the element that matters most thematically is the introduction of the Mutant Registration Act, which was originally going to be introduced in memory of Senator Kelly, a politician the X-Men failed to save from assassination, but which Kelly was able to introduce himself when they saved him thanks to some handy-dandy time travel. From then on anti-mutant sentiment becomes a predominant motif in the book, with both harmless Professor X and cute-as-a-button Kitty Pryde being “mutant-bashed” and practically every non-mutant character uttering some sort of anti-mutant slur. The Mutant Registration Act stands a symbol of that attitude, with support for it standing as a handy identifier for bigots.

Which brings us back to airport security. Because if you think about it for a moment it becomes clear that something like the Mutant Registration Act would be absolutely necessary. Imagine standing in line at the airport and knowing that some of the people around you might be able to project energy beams, or bend metal, or mind-control the pilot; that they might not be fully able to control their powers; and that these people had a documented history of fighting other people like them in public places. Would you feel confident about getting on a plane? (I’ll bet the airlines were Senator Kelly’s biggest contributors.)

The X-Men series is often described as being a metaphor for the oppression of minorities, but when looked at it this way it becomes clear that the metaphor doesn’t stand up: if superhuman mutants really existed society would have a legitimate reason to fear or at least be wary of them, something that has never been true of any oppressed minority.

But if the metaphor that’s supposed to be at the heart of the series doesn’t work, why has the comic been so successful? Because the X-Men don’t represent oppressed minorities, they represent oppressed teenagers. (This may also explain why comic books about characters who are actually part of oppressed minorities generally fail to sell.) Nobody feels more persecuted than teenagers, especially the nerdy, white, middle-class teenagers who have traditionally been the main audience for comics. In the hyper-dramatic world of the teenager, breaking up with your girlfriend (or, more likely, being turned down for a date) has the same emotional impact as your fiancee being disintegrated on the Moon, and being hunted by giant robots is exactly equivalent to being told to buy something or get out.

Chris Hayward wrote a lengthy post on the G20 protests and, in his opinion, why they work and are necessary. It’s well worth reading, even if there are important parts of it where I think he’s completely wrong. (His extensive summary of police abuses is not one of those parts.) Go read it and come back; I’ll be sitting here eating salt and vinegar Crispers.

…okay. (I didn’t need to eat them anyway. They are fattening.) So, here we go:

“Does protesting really accomplish anything?”…

I think it does. One of the best – and most current – examples I can offer to back up my conviction are the accomplishments of the Gay liberation movement, in its broadest sense.

He goes on to offer a pretty good argument of how protesting – and specifically Pride marching – helped energize and legitimize the gay rights movement. And he’s totally correct about how protesting helped the gay rights movement. But as I’ve argued before, the difference between the gay rights movement (or the black rights movement, or the feminist movement, or really any civil rights movement in general) and G20 protesting is dead simple: every one of those movements have had fairly clear, easy to explain goals that were widely agreed upon by those involved. You can sum up most of them in a single sentence: “we just want to be treated the same as white men, and have the same rights and privileges afforded to white men.”

Hayward, later in his essay, starts writing about what reasons exist to protest the G20. Here is a summary:

– the misbehaviour and/or rapacious policies of the IMF
– the effects of 20th-century neocolonialism
– the responsibility of much of the political/financial elites for the financial meltdown and their ensuing lack of punishment/responsibility
– the move towards budget austerity
– failure to agree upon an international banking transaction tax
– job losses
– indigenous sovereignty
– human rights abuses
– abuse of police authority
– environmental damages of the tar sands
– etc.

All of this combined is not a protest message. This is a political philosophy, and it’s not a particularly simple one either.1 That it’s not simple frankly isn’t much of a plus from a communication standpoint. Hayward’s summary of the issues involved is about as concise as you can manage and it would still be multiple pages, and frankly Hayward is a lot better at making his point than ninety-nine point nine nine nine a lot more nines percent of protesters because his summation of issues is coherent while being able to deal with complexity.

Multiple pages in a book is too much for a protest. Again, harkening back to the aforementioned civil rights movements: I would suggest that the reason they were successful, more than anything else, was their simplicity. The message was easily communicated, which is key because protests generate a lot of attention but only for a very brief time. Protests are by their very nature not good at nuance, and the G20 protesters’ message is, when it’s coherent, extremely nuanced. Hayward himself admits that the protests are “unfocused,” but he seems to think this is to the good:

The world economy is affecting people in diverse ways. And our response to that is diverse. A meeting of the people who are steering the global economy is an opportunity to say “These are all the ways that you are hurting people. Cut it out.”

Look, it’s wonderful and affirming and all that the movement celebrates diversity, but there’s a difference between upholding the principles of IDIC2 and effective communication. Why does the left so desperately need to avoid the principles of advertising that have been demonstrated to work, time and again? (Moral rectitude is not a worthwhile response to that question; I don’t care if you think Company X’s ads are soul-destroying, because the techniques they use to communicate their position work and they can work for the left just as easily as they work for the corporate First World.)

Look, let’s take one issue from that list above. I’m going to pick the banking transaction tax, because it was both an issue under consideration at the Toronto G20 and also an unambiguously simple and good idea. Now let’s pretend that, rather than the usual disorganized chaotic mess that we saw, they (somehow) managed to get everybody on one page, chanting “TAX THE BANKS! TAX THE BANKS!” over and over again. It’s simple. It demonstrates popular support on one side of an important issue, which would have given those leaders who were pushing for the international transaction tax – and bear in mind that included the USA, France and Japan, which is why before the summit most observers figured the transaction tax had a 50/50 chance of passing – additional ammunition. Would that have been enough to get the G20 to agree to the tax? Maybe, maybe not. Would it have given the tax a better chance of success? I think that’s unarguable.

Anyway, I know I’m jumping all over Hayward’s article like a rabbit on crack, but I need to leave alone that hobbyhorse and switch to a different one: elsewhere, Hayward is writing about violent protest.

I believe that the advocates of property destruction are responding to a sense that the peaceful forms of protest are simply not working. And I have to say, having attended a hundred or so demonstrations myself, I agree. It certainly feels to me like governments are quite happy to ignore the demands of demonstrations, knowing that, in general, people will get together for a few hours, make some speeches, chant, follow an escorted and permitted route, and then go home. It’s routine and ritualized. It appears to me that protest of any kind works when it is an implicit threat to misbehave; not just a moral appeal that says “please do the right thing,” but an appeal that says “listen to us, or we will stop co-operating.”

Now, I don’t disagree with any of this paragraph, actually. It’s all correct: peaceful protest isn’t working (although I don’t entirely agree with Hayward as to the reasons why, I suspect), and part of the reasons protest can work is because of that threat of disobedience.

The problem I have here is that Hayward seems to think that the protesters are capable of making that threat. They aren’t. This is one of the reasons a lot of the public is willing to simply dismiss protesters as cranks (at best) or criminals (at worst): there simply isn’t any threatening capacity. If 20,000 people had been involved in the riots, then possibly there would have been a scenario comparable to the race riots of 1967-68 or the DNC riot in Chicago in 1968. But, as many people on all sides of the political equation pointed out, only about one or two thousand rioters actually stuck around once the goon squad started smashing things, and most of those one or two thousand weren’t willing to do anything more than stand around and chant slogans. This is not threatening. This is not even close to threatening. The reason protesters can be so easily vilified as criminals is because, when you’ve got a couple hundred people smashing things for no real reason, most people can very easily make the mental jump to “criminals.”

And while I agree that protests can be routine, there simply isn’t any justifiable reason for the sort of violence that happened at the G20. Yes, I get that things like Starbucks and RBC and the like were targeted, but so what? Damaging their property accomplishes literally nothing. “Yeah, you totally dealt out some pain on that imaginary corporate entity!” If a protester smashes RBC’s window, that’s not going to affect RBC’s bottom line; it’s not even going to going to hurt their public image. All you’re doing when you smash up a Starbucks is causing economic pain to a franchise owner: somebody who’s usually the definition of “small businessman.” How does that help your cause? Answer: it doesn’t.

The unfortunate truth is that any significant protest movement is going to need an economic component to it, akin to the black “strikes” on busses and white-owned businesses in the Sixties, or the mid-70s clustering of gay neighborhoods around gay-owned businesses which in turn gave them economic self-sufficiency and an instant business lobby in local government (which, while unglamourous, drives social change faster than just about anything). The G20 protest movement doesn’t have this, and honestly I’m not sure that in this era it’s even possible for them to have one, although I’d love to be proven wrong.

Oh, and one more thing:

(I was way more scared when the [Toronto Blue] Jays [baseball team] won the World Series and people were throwing bottles out of their apartment windows, than I have ever been in a political riot).

Dude. I was at both World Series street celebrations, right at Yonge and Dundas, and if you’re going to suggest that sports riots cause more damage than political ones (an argument that actually has some heft to it), don’t ruin your point by telling us how scared you were of what were easily the most peaceful and civic-minded sports victory celebrations in sporting history. The Toronto celebrations were so non-violent that for literally years afterward they were pointed to as aberrations against a growingly dangerous norm.

1. Libertarianism, for example, is simple, which is one of the reasons it’s so frequently attractive to people. It’s often wrong about many things, of course, but it’s effective at spreading itself. [↩]
2. NEEEEEEEERRRRRD [↩]

I was at the bar with friends last week and discussion turned to the G20, mostly because I hadn’t seen most of them in a while and I wanted to tell them all my good G20 stories (IE, “the ones I won’t publish online because they were off the record”), and subsequently it turned into a discussion about protests. First of course there was the criticism of the protest movement that mostly echoed last Wednesday’s post, but then it turned to something that I think was more interesting, which is: is protest, as we currently understand it, outdated? The arguments in favour of that hypothesis seem fairly strong.

Let’s start off with a simple definition and say that protest movements exist to do two things: change the minds of the public on an issue, and empower individuals to work together to force elite decisionmaking in favour of the “protest” side of the issue. (Okay, also they exist for social reasons and there will always be those who are just there for an adrenalin rush. Let us assume that the primary reason for protests is social change.)

The problem is that your standard protest model is, nowadays, bad at doing both of these things. Even in those situations where protests don’t dissolve into a cacophony of various messages of dissent only tenuously connected to one another, the standard protest model suffers from a problematic catch-22: in order to significantly impact the news cycle, a protest must be really big, but the larger a protest becomes, the more likely it is to be ineffective due to lessened public support due to the inconvenience of the protest and the perception that it’s a one-off stunt. And even when a protest significantly impacts the news cycle, it’s still a one-off event in a modern culture which has trouble remembering what happened in the news three months ago.

“Aha,” you say, “but what about the Tea Party? What about European labour protests?” And these are interesting discussions. The Tea Party isn’t really a good counterexample. Although they have had a number of protests and have had some impact on public debate in the United States, they also aren’t following the traditional protest model, which is “have a really big protest and then that’s it for a while in terms of public visibility.” Granted, liberal protesters might argue that they don’t get any public visibility outside of protests due to media complacency, and they have a point there. But that right there is why the Tea Party has had more impact on the media: they’re essentially sponsored by a cable news network, which has allowed them to outlive the news cycle and become a constant presence.1 Since most protests will not get that advantage, pointing to the Tea Party as a measure of protest success is erroneous. On top of that, for all the visibility the Tea Party has enjoyed, they haven’t really had that much success at shifting public opinion; there has been no groundswell of support for their pet issues and the movement has remained mostly confined to conservative Republicans despite halfhearted attempts to reach out to libertarians. Really, the Tea Party is more reflective of the current state of the Republican party base than anything else.

As for European labour protests, sure, they work – but they work because when European labour movements go out and protest, that’s not a protest fringe doing it; that’s a hefty chunk of the country. People talk about how the G20 protest was big, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the antiwar protests conducted five or six years ago – and those in turn are equivalent to a smaller European labour protest, except that the American antiwar protests were mostly one-day or very occasionally two-day affairs, whereas European labour protests can go for weeks if need be (and have). European labour protests aren’t analagous to the modern North American protest movement expressly because they aren’t interested in shifting public opinion2, but rather in representing a large portion of the public. This makes the “swaying public opinion” part of the protest model null; all these protests are designed to do is sway elite decisions.

So, if traditional protest is no longer good for swaying both the public and the elites, what can do it? This is where I come up empty; none of the existing options seem to work. In the US, phone-in campaigns to Congressional offices have had some success at pushing representatives on important votes, but quite apart from the fact that phone campaigns don’t sway public opinion at all? Even if we accept that the phone system is a solid answer – and I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as some claim – simple numbers seem to make it essentially non-duplicable outside of the United States. There are about 700,000 Americans for every representative in Congress. Most other nations have a much lower citizens-to-representative ratio, generally ranging from 100000:1 (the United Kingdom) to 150000:1 (Australia). If you want to flood their phonebanks, phone campaigns need a participation rate essentially six times as high as happens in the United States. This seems unlikely.

Facebook/Twitter/other internet petitions and polls are flawed from a different end. Phone calls and letter-writing are the traditional weapons of choice for people attempting to make their voices heard to their representatives, but both of these methods require a person to really, really care about an issue.3 This is why politicians have traditionally multiple-counted people doing these things: the assumption is that since one person was angry enough about the issue to contact their representative, therefore there are X more people who feel the same way and will be less inclined to vote for the representative (at a minimum). But internet petitions have almost no disincentives attached to them: there’s a degree of anonymity involved4 and there’s next to no effort required, which means that representatives/politicians not only don’t multiple-count the people involved, they sometimes even discount them (in the “this person will never change their vote based on issue X” sense). Even when they don’t discount, the numbers taken at face value are almost never big enough to influence decisionmakers. Fair Copyright For Canada’s 87,543 members means an average of 284 members per riding, which isn’t enough to swing anything other than the absolute swingiest of swing ridings.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure, to be honest. A combination of social media petitioning to raise public awareness of the issue above and beyond current standards combined with phone-ins coordinated to a degree as yet unexperienced seems like it could work, but it also seems like it would be extremely difficult. Something entirely new, of course, always has potential, but the problem with something entirely new is that I don’t know what that is. Better minds than mine, etc.

1. The more you talk about a thing being a thing, the more likely it is that that thing will become a thing. [↩]
2. I know anarchist commenters here have said they’re not interested in doing that either, but let’s just assume that the majority of left-wing protesters aren’t idiots. [↩]
3. Calling is easy, but has an invasive edge to it that most people instinctively avoid; letter-writing is time-consuming and costs you a stamp. [↩]
4. Or, at the very least, the perceived semi-anonymity people assume exists on the internet and almost never does. [↩]

During my mayoral liveblog last night, I got an email from someone who, because I was mocking candidates for being so overwhelmingly pro-police after a series of truly ridiculous abuses of power during the G20, asked if I thought that this was out of institutional fear of the protesters; that the protesters represent a threat to the established power structure and etc.

The answer, of course, is “no.” The protesters aren’t any threat to the established power structure, not as they currently exist.

Now, many a protester will tell you (and has told me) that the reason most people don’t take them seriously is because the mainstream media12 has obscured their message and chosen to portray them as a bunch of silly, flighty, violent thugs. As I’ve said before, though, the problem with this theory is that the protesters’ message comes pre-obscured to the general public. Since a mass protest – and just about every G-whatever protest – frequently has no specific central organizing issue, this means that every protester brings their own issues along with them. Since protesters are generally an accomodating lot, there’s genial support for all issues being protested so long as they’re reasonably somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. But this also means that the issues, as they are, are lost. All that is communicated is that the protesters are angry (or, if you prefer, passionate).

Which means that the average viewer of a protest takes away the following:

– the protesters are angry (or passionate)
– they are shouting
– they are marching
– sometimes some of them break things and/or fight with police
– and usually some of them get arrested

You don’t need a compliant media to decide that this movement is composed of silly, violent thugs if that’s the information you’ve got to work with.

On top of that, though, is that when protests turn violent, what I don’t think many protesters understand is that this is always a losing situation for them. Yes, it’s always only a few idiots; that’s a given. But one thing that remains relatively constant (not universal, but relatively constant) is that their fellows are reluctant (or worse, unwilling) to condemn them. Understandable, of course – even if the cries of “solidarity” weren’t genuine (and they mostly are), simple commonality of focus and the shared experience of being targeted by police would do the job.

But here’s the problem: when protesters are reluctant or unwilling to condemn violence – and honestly, it happens more often than not – what they’re doing is setting themselves up in a state of moral equality with the state using force against them. Saying “but the cops have guns and shields and riot armor” isn’t a justification for violence3; if anything it’s a confirmation that the speaker’s issue isn’t that use of violent force is bad, but that the cops can do it more easily than they can.4

Finally, it’s worth noting that the movement itself is likely counterproductive. Kevin Drum recently posted about how Tea Partiers and Republicans catering to Tea Partiers were driving independent voters away from the Republican party and making Democrats more willing to vote and organize. Looking at polling on the issue of police reaction, Canadians by and large sympathized with the police over the protesters despite the fact that police overreach was both massive and pretty well documented. I don’t think there can be any question that this is antagonistic public reaction to the protests themselves, and if you look at previous polls concerning protesting in Canada the trend holds up5, and largely isn’t about anger at their use of violence so much as it is dislike of the general protest movement.6

Can all of these issues be overcome, and thus make the protest movement more effective at shifting public opinion? I think it’s possible, but here’s the thing: everything that would make it possible – IE, would serve to fix the abovementioned issues – would likely require greater central authority and coordination among the protesters, and the protest movement is by its very nature decentralized (and not really keen on the idea of greater central authority anyway). Which is why I don’t think the protest movement isn’t going to see its objectives come to fruition any time soon.

1. Or politicians, or whatever permutation of The Man you prefer. [↩]
2. True story: at one point during the G20 protests, a protest organizer refused to speak with us because we were wearing our media accreditation badges and explained that he was sympathetic only to the media accredited for the Alternative Media Centre. So we showed him our Alternative Media Centre accreditation, which we had gotten first, and he immediately became receptive. When he asked us why we weren’t using that centre, we explained that it was shit and absolutely everybody in it was trying to get proper accreditation. [↩]
3. Trust me when I say that at the G20 in Toronto I heard this so often I constructed a Bingo card in my head of Stuff The Cops Have and played it anew with every conversation. [↩]
4. At this point an anarchist may wish to say something, so let me pre-empt them by saying that communal anarchism is at best a meaningless philosophy when applied to a group larger than a couple of hundred people, and even then its failure rate is tremendous. Please go get a realistic philosophy of government and get back to me. Thank you for your time. [↩]
5. A key point would be the polling over time surrounding the prorogation of Parliament earlier this year. As the protests happened, outrage against the Tories noticeably dropped. [↩]
6. I think the general public understands that the vast majority of protesters do not use violent tactics. I also think the general public believes that the vast majority of protesters don’t or can’t keep the violent assholes from attending protests, even when they know what’s going to happen. [↩]

For those just wanting to read my G20 stuff for Torontoist rather than go through the site looking for it, here you go.

…as I am Torontoist’s official accredited journalist (well, one of two, but I do the writing bits) covering the G20 summit here in Toronto (motto: “When We Have An Economic Summit, We Have Earthquakes And Tornadoes Just To Make The Fucking Point”). Needless to say, this is totally awesome and I hope I get the opportunity to do Jello shots with Paul Krugman, but it also means I am basically not here for the next four days.

So head over to Torontoist and follow along with all the world summit skinny and, presumably, the eventual massive riots.

So the swirling rumour in Canadian politics of the day is that the Liberals and the New Democrats will unify to create a new, centre-left party.

Now, on the one hand, this sounds reasonable, because this is basically what the right-wing parties in Canada did years ago. On the other hand, the basic argument for this idea is that the Liberals are incapable of finding a leader with charisma, and at least Jack Layton looks vaguely human. (Note that the link points out that a “Liberal Democrat” party led by Layton would be victorious, and one led by Michael “useless limpdick” Ignatieff would lose. That Michael Ignatieff would lose an election in a country where generally only forty percent of the country at best is inclined to vote Tory tells you a lot about how useless a limpdick he in fact is.)

Of course, the problem is that in getting the strengths of both parties, you also get their weaknesses: this means you combine the funding collapse of the Liberals with the not-ready-for-prime-time economic strategies of much of the NDP (and, speaking as someone who has spent time in the NDP previously and is pretty reliably left in his politics, some of the lack of understanding of basic economic principles of many Dippers is just incredibly irritating to me). The potential voter has both the leeriness of voting soulless Liberal (and the Liberals will be soulless for as long as it takes them to start defending their record of leadership; why nobody in the party bothers to point out that Paul Martin’s government is largely responsible for Canada mostly avoiding the global financial meltdown is beyond me) and unready NDP. That combination is potentially toxic.

Of course, what’s more important is whether or not a reformed Liberal party would have any chance of picking up additional seats. Would they get a majority? Probably not. Looking at 2008 election results, if you go with a formula of “Liberal Democrats” getting a combined vote of the NDP and Liberals in any given riding and then subtracting ten percent (assuming the most pessimistic scenario with swing voters going Tory and disaffecteds voting Green), they pick up about another twelve to fifteen ridings, which still doesn’t win them an election. However, the upside is that the ridings they’ve already won become extremely solid, which means they can campaign harder in swing ridings and have more effect; they can also more reliably portray themselves as a national party, as they would become competitive in quite a few ridings in BC and Manitoba where they currently aren’t.

Is it a good idea? With the right leader, potentially. Unfortunately, they don’t really have the right leader. When Jack Layton is your best-case scenario, you have issues.

Darren Kramble writes to ask:

As a Canadian ex-pat, I know that the Tories currently have a minority government, but I have no idea how that is going. Anyway, I live in the UK, and the country seems to be freaking out at our hung parliament, as if it is the end of the political world. I’m fairly happy with it, as Labour is now out, as they inevitably would be, but the Tories don’t have a majority that would allow the more batshit crazy things they might want to try. So, any advice to the UK? How is having a minority government working?

Short version: not very well.

Longer version: In the past, Canada’s had very productive minority governments. Lester B. Pearson, for example, gave us major policy changes with a minority government, which included universal healthcare, armed forces unification, and our new flag. There’s nothing in a minority government that inherently says that they have to be unproductive or bad.

However, our recent minority governments, while certainly not outright disastrous, is less than satisfactory. There’s a few reasons for this, some of which are specific to Canada and some of which I’m pretty sure are universal.

What’s specific to Canada is that here, our parties have become regionalized to a certain extent – the Liberals in the eastern half and more urban areas of the country, the Tories in the western half and more rural areas, the NDP competing mostly with the Liberals for space. There’s less incentive to cooperate because excacerbating cross-party and therefore regional tension is, frankly, better for your electoral prospects. (In a UK context, this seems like it could potentially be an issue, given that Labour and the Tories have their regional strongholds to an extent.)

What’s not specific to Canada is this: in a minority government, somebody has to take power. This seems like it’s not an issue, but it is because the minority government, Parliamentary power or not, is in charge and therefore can determine when an election takes place, either by calling one or by putting forth a bill which gets defeated.

This seems like a precarious position, but in practice it isn’t, because in Canada the Tories have figured out something which is obvious on its face but which has no real applicable context beyond a minority government position, which is this: the electorate mostly doesn’t like elections. Which isn’t surprising, because elections tend to be vast resevoirs of bullshit expunged forth combined with general nastiness and pettiness, made even less pleasant thanks to the omnipresence of mass media. (This is my general theory as to why electoral participation has steadily trended downward in most democracies over time.)

So if voters don’t like elections, what do they want? As few elections as possible. But what do minority governments generally guarantee? An election sooner rather than later. So whenever the minority threatens to bring down the government over an issue, you get the endless caterwauling about “endless elections” from both the citizenry and the media willing to complain about it (and they are more than willing, believe me). Which in turn means that the minority is generally blamed for the extra elections which come with minority governments, even when that doesn’t actually make sense given the track record. (Note that the 2006 and 2008 federal elections were both called by the party in power trying to seize electoral advantage; the former failed for the Liberals, the latter succeeded for the Conservatives.)

So there’s essentially a built-in political downside to forcing an election if you’re in the minority. What happens? Well, in Canada we mostly have feckless dipshits for political leaders (really – David Cameron looks good in comparison), so their natural political cowardice combines with the disincentive to call a federal election and thus you have a minority government more or less governing as a majority government, which just pisses off and disenfranchises everybody who didn’t vote for them. (Which, in Canada, right now means more than 60 percent of the country.) This just perpetuates the vicious cycle: voters are disillusioned by their lack of control over political process, so they don’t vote, which results in them having even less control, and so on and so forth.

In short: first-past-the-post systems are terrible for minority governments. A proportional system like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems want is much better for producing responsive minority governments because they basically require cross-party cooperation to work in the first place; that’s what you want.