----- 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
