- As the country's political conversation turns to new free trade agreements and continental integration, Erin points out one more example of how the last set delivered exactly the results feared by their detractors when it came to innovation, rather than the gains promised by free-trade supporters. Which is why the Star is right to be skeptical of yet another process that figures to exclude Canadian citizens from having any say.
- But at least with Canada seeing far too little resistance to corporatist policy demands, the potential EU trade agreement figures to raise some activist ire across the Atlantic.
- And there's some relatively good news on a global scale when it comes to dealing with some of the problems that are being denied or ignored by the Con government in Canada, as the Cancun agreement on climate change at least suggests some surprising positive momentum (even if it falls far short of actually defining how the world will deal with greenhouse gas emissions in the years to come).
- Finally, via impolitical, Sylvia Bashevkin's commentary on how progressive political scientists are having little impact on the broader political scene is well worth a read. But it's worth noting that the problems identified by Bashevkin go far beyond political scientists as such:
The core belief that civil society exists, and that it operates in part as an essential check on the actions of democratic states, has been endangered for decades—or for so long that we risk forgetting this foundational idea. One crucial reason why progressive political science enjoys minimal public profile is because it is grounded in the valuation of a highly oppositional idea, one that has been seriously on the defensive since the rise of neoconservatism, namely the belief that citizen mobilization and government action can produce positive improvements in the lives of individuals and for the collective entity we call society.
Given the dominant view since the 1980s that markets matter, while states and societies (if the latter even exist) do not, it is hardly surprising to find low rates of voter turnout among citizens who came of age in that decade and following. Eroded levels of electoral participation and declining public trust in political institutions and leaders have spread to middle-aged and older voters as well. Moreover, a dangerous feedback loop has evolved to reinforce this pattern, since diminishing the importance of government means fewer and fewer of the best and the brightest are attracted to run for office or join the public service. The tenor of parliamentary debates has arguably declined as well, with civil behaviour and meaningful policy debates increasingly rare in our aptly named question periods (that produce few answers to the problems facing Canadians). What citizen realistically believes, particularly in an age of such dauntingly complex policy challenges, that democratic government can provide solutions to problems when both the A and B teams have deserted the polis?
...
The demand for political science analysis is, of course, the flip side of the supply problem. It is true that progressive perspectives have been diluted by a rightward shift in print and electronic media organizations since the 1980s, but this is only part of the story. The more troubling piece is that conservative advocates have been better communicators, finding new ways to dress up old ideas such as laissez-faire capitalism and patriarchal family organization in spiffy new outfits for each debating season. Even with rising levels of formal education in Canada and most of the industrialized world, those concepts are still easier to explain than Keynesianism or gender equality and, in anxious times, they enjoy the advantage of evoking nostalgic ties to a shared (however imperfect) past.
The crucial edge the right enjoys, however, follows from a conscious, decisive push to invest in foundations, think tanks, conferences, media outlets and so on to promote a particular point of view, and to train like-minded folks to sing with impact from the conservative hymnal. Alas, nothing close to matching funds has materialized in the rest of the political spectrum—a phenomenon that underpins the absence of fresh, compelling voices that could champion consumer rights or affordable housing, with these perspectives creatively repackaged in attractive ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment