----- 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
