----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, February 06, 2002 10:25
PM
Subject: FW: Anger in politics
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
