|
Hi Gail,
A
brief reply to a very provocative note... At the bottom, I have the feeling that
all politics is about "interests"--corporate, community, collective,
personal--however you want to slice or dice it. When "interests" are
threatened no matter by whom or to what end, people get angry so the issue is
not the anger but the interests.
I also
have the feeling that some of the edges of the grand conflicts of our time,
which were mitigated by the broad sweep of social democracy/social welfarism and
the rising post WWII tide, have now begun for a variety of reasons (being
explored by FW for example) to shift back to their more normal state of being
raw and occasionally bloody.
The
anger is a symptom of folks who are hurting and who feel rather let down that
the social consensus which used to prevail and which they were more or less
comfortable with, no longer holds and so we have the kind of thing quoted by Ed
and the responses to Harris in Ontario.
MG
Ed, Mike, Keith,
Having already a sufficient number of lines
in the water on FW I don't want to add another or would be sending you this
question on-list. (If, in response, you have a comment you'd like to put
on-list, please don't hesitate. It's not a private question.)
Ed wrote: "what his government
is doing is driven by a punitive and destructive ideology" (re Gordon Campbell in B.C.) and I had recently had occasion to note on FW the
"anger" with which the Harris government in Ontario had come into office and
behaved.
The issue of "anger" in politics is coming
to seem to me the source of more problems than ideology per se. Our political
processes seem to legitimate and perhaps even foster anger -- the release of
distaste, dislike and disrespect rather than the surge of empathy, compassion
or thoughtfulness. The larger ties-that-bind seem to get lost. I find it
increasingly frightening, likely to invite the growth of serious civil
discontent and especially unfortunate in an age when so many issues
concern the "commons."
Does it point, do you
think, to a need to strengthening the integrative processes and
temper the partisan or are such antipathetic emotions healthy, maybe even
essential outlets, in a body politic? Democracies use the adversarial system
deliberately and to good effect (e.g., parliaments and courts, the "balancing
of powers" in the US, etc.) but by taking for granted that it is
legitimate for leaders to govern "punitively and
destructively" it sometimes seems to me we risk corroding the
foundations of democratic politics that lie in fellow-feeling. Such leaders
lose their capacity to represent "all the people" thus threatening the
legitimacy of government itself. B.C. seems to me to verge on this from time
to time. Were it a country and not "merely" a province, safe within the arms
of a larger federation, I suspect it might be in difficulty in a system of
government that requires the consent of the governed to make it
work.
Perhaps all this is
so self-evident as not to be worth mentioning but sometimes the necessary
foundations of a situation become weakened through being taken so for
granted they are not articulated?
Your wisdom on this, gentlemen?
Regards,
Gail
| 