Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Essay: "The Purifying Effect of Power"

It's hard to remember now, but not so long ago the biggest impediment to the old Reform party taking power was that someone in their party would say something stupid.  The Reform (or the Conservative Party, after the merger) would be riding high for a while, and then the Honourable Member from Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump or somewhere equally remote would pipe up about how he didn't believe in evolution, or some ghastly personal opinion about immigrants or homosexuals, and then the Liberals would coast to another majority.



That all changed when Stephen Harper took over the party.  Back-benching MPs learned pretty quickly to shut their mouths and keep their appalling beliefs to themselves.  It became common in left-wing circles to accuse the Conservatives of having a "hidden agenda."  Sure, we all said, the Conservatives are keeping quiet for now.  But if they should get elected!  Heaven forbid.

Of course, the Conservatives did get elected (with a little help from Jack Layton).  At first it was just a minority. The talk of a "hidden agenda" didn't stop, of course.  Harper would show his "real" self if he ever got a majority - and God help us then!

And then, of course, the Conservatives got their majority (again, with an enormous amount of help from Mr. Layton).  Yet we have not seen much of a shift to the right at all, from a social perspective, other than an idiotic law and order agenda and some tough talk about Iran.  Most of the things that piss us off about Harper are not necessarily inherently socially conservative (such as the fiscal disaster of the G20, and the relentless information control).

It's a little known fact that Harper has now appointed 5 judges to the Supreme Court of Canada.  That's a majority.  If Mr. Harper really did harbour any desire to criminalize abortion, gay marriage, or press a socially conservative agenda, that's where he would have to start.  Unlike the process in the United States, the Supreme Court justices are appointed by the Governor General (in other words, basically by the Prime Minister himself).  He does not even need to go through the House of Commons.  But all of Harper's appointments have been completely uncontroversial.  As a left-leaning lawyer, I can tell you that none of them made a ripple.

So what happened?  Was the hidden agenda a myth?  Partially.  But then, the Conservative Party is made up of a number of people with disparate goals.  Many of them are pro life and opposed to gay marriage, or in favour of the death penalty.  A huge portion of the Conservative support also share such views. I don't think it's a stretch to say that they thought Harper would represent their interest on these issues.  But he's not, other than throwing an occasional bone (such as the recent vote on abortion) to make sure we don't see a federal Wild Rose party. So why not?

To someone in Ontario, the answer is obvious.  If he did, he'd lose the election for sure. Harper has become a moderate because he wants to hold onto power (something all of us must agree he is awfully good at).  We commonly think of power as a corrupting influence; think of Mayor Carcetti in "The Wire", who gets elected as a reformer but then sees his agenda melt away into nothingness as he has to learn how to "play the game" to keep his job.  But the influence does not seem so "corrupting" when the person being "corrupted" moves closer to your political views, instead of further away from them.

There are limits to political power.  People don't have to do what you tell them to, even at gunpoint.  We think of power as the freedom to do whatever you want, but it is always very narrowly constrained within the band of what's acceptable.  It's not corrupting any more than it's purifying.  It's just the limit of what any of us can really do.

That can be a bad thing, but it can also be very good.  We have plenty of stupid entrenched practices in our society, but that does not mean we would improve upon them simply by dreaming up new ideas from first principles. It's not so much that the way we do things is great, it's that there are always unintended consequences for our actiosn.

The inertia we see in government astounding.  Unless faced with an acute political crisis (Hitler invades, a terrorist attack, an economic meltdown) our governments are astonishingly reluctant to do anything at all.  That's why we see frustratingly little action to prevent bad things from happening when there is no immediate problem (like reducing carbon emissions, or investing in infrastructure). But is that always bad? If every time someone got elected we started from scratch, would we really be better off?  The limits of power are frustrating when they are restricting your political champion, but they can be a blessing when they are hampering the other guy.

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