----- 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
