In the lead-up to the 2015 Canadian federal election I offered a few thoughts on what was happening south of the border. At the time, the presidential primaries were just getting started and we were witnessing the unlikely rise of Donald J. Trump as a Republican contender. Now, as the primary process draws to a close and Trump appears to be headed toward becoming the Republican party’s nominee, it might be a good time to expand a bit on what I said.

Here are the relevant parts from that earlier post:

[The] problem with the Republicans may be that a particular historical strand of American conservatism has played itself out. In terms of cultural conservatism it seems as though the “culture wars” are, if not over, at least moving into a new, yet-to-be-determined phase. The right to an abortion is now settled, and the fight over gay marriage mostly is too. Human-driven climate change is a fact accepted by everyone who is not a complete idiot. The idea that the U.S. can build a wall separating itself from Mexico (or Canada), and somehow round up all its illegal immigrants and send them back to their countries of origin is laughable. And yet all of this can be found in the platforms of leading Republican candidates.

When it comes to economic or fiscal conservatism the picture is just as bleak for right-wing politicians. In a nutshell: what advantage do they offer over the center or center-left? Economic inequality has continued to grow unabated under Democratic presidents, and it seems very unlikely that Hillary Clinton will do anything to stop these trends. If you’re a member of the 1%, or 0.1%, or the 0.01%, you have nothing to worry about: the Dems have your back. If you want to say that neoliberalism won the battle for ideas I don’t think that would be far from the mark (leaving aside the question of what such a victory means). And that being so, what is there left to mobilize right-wing voters who are fiscal conservatives?

In short, the conservative movement has found itself left behind on almost every issue. This doesn’t mean they’re doomed to irrelevancy, far from it, but it does mean that either they or the world will need to change course in some dramatic way for them to regain power. And I am inclined to think it’s the world that is more likely to change first.

Where does this leave conservatives? Primarily as an anti-government party. This is a ridiculous position for any national political party to take, but in at least one sense it may have some traction. I sense a growing divide between public (unionized) and private sector workers both in Canada and the U.S. that could make for a coming split between a party of the state and a party of everyone else. If there is a future for the right it may be here.

Perhaps I made a mistake in my wondering over the future of “the right.” The fact is, both Clinton and Trump are right-wing candidates. As I pointed out, neoliberalism has swept the field in the battle of ideas. With Hillary Clinton being supported by figures like Henry Kissinger and Charles Koch, there clearly isn’t a whole lot of room left for Republicans to maneuver. The problem facing the right is that, as I said in my earlier post, they’ve been left behind. As a result, there is a need for both Republicans and the Canadian Conservative Party to reset entirely.

It’s hard to overstate just how badly the core elements in the right’s traditional political platform have been damaged. National security and foreign affairs, for example, have long been considered a Republican strength. But the war in Iraq is now widely seen as having been ill-advised and poorly executed, while the national security state is something that makes a lot of people on the left and the right nervous. In his campaign Trump was not afraid to call the Iraq war a mistake or to point to the fact that George W. Bush did not in fact keep America safe during his time in office. By now about the only thing that Republicans can do to make themselves sound tough is to threaten nuclear war.

The other core issue for the right has been fiscal stewardship and management of the economy. Here again, however, right-wing or neoliberal policies (free trade, lower taxes, less government regulation, etc.) have been a disaster. That these policies have been adopted and endorsed by establishment Democrats does not change this, though such a move to the right has added to the popularity of more progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

Here is Paul Campos, writing in Salon, with some of the details:

For the last several decades, the Republican party has been selling a simple economic message to its base: what is good for rich people is good for you too.  And, until this election, the base was buying it.  The astonishing rise of Donald Trump is an almost apocalyptic sign that they’re not buying it any more.

The GOP establishment has seen all of its candidates not merely beaten, but utterly humiliated, by an aggressively ignorant demagogue, whose rhetoric makes him sound like a cheap knockoff of Benito Mussolini and George Wallace.

Why? A look at the facts of American economic life suggests that the rubes have decided they’re tired of being played for marks, which explains why the GOP establishment’s siren song about the Land of Opportunity is no longer doing the trick.

The basic myth the right wing of The Money Party has sold to Republican voters over the past 40 years (the left wing of the party is called the Democrats) goes like this: the economy boomed in the decades immediately after World War II, and standards of living rose rapidly.  But since then, too much government regulation, too many taxes, and an overly generous welfare system that has made Those People even lazier than they were before have combined to kill the American dream.

That is why ordinary Americans (aka working and middle-class white people) have bank accounts that don’t reflect the rewards they should have received for all their hard work. If not for government meddling we would have a thriving economy, just like the one we enjoyed back in the good old days.

All this is a fantastic lie, as a glance at the actual economic history of America since 1945 illustrates.  (In what follows, all figures have been converted to constant, inflation-adjusted dollars).

America is a vastly wealthier country today than it was forty years ago.  Furthermore, on a per-person basis, the country’s wealth has increased far more over the past four decades than it did in the thirty years immediately after World War II.

Here are the numbers: between 1945 and 1974, per capita GDP in the U.S. grew from $17,490 to $27,837.  That is an impressive improvement, but it pales in comparison to what has happened since: in 2014, per capita GDP was $55,185, i.e., almost exactly double what it was in 1974.  In terms of economic output, the country is twice as rich per person now as it was then.

Where has all this money gone?  The answer ought to shock anyone who cares about either economic opportunity or increasing inequality.  The average household income of the bottom 50% of American households was $25,475 in 1974, and $26,520 in 2014.  In other words, half the population has gotten essentially none of the extra $10 trillion dollars of national wealth that the American economy has generated over the past forty years.

Keep in mind that this group includes fully half of the nation’s middle class, by every standard definition of that category.

Meanwhile, over this same time, the average household income of the top five percent of American households (most of the members of this group would not, of course, consider themselves rich, let alone part of the actual plutocracy) has gone from $187,729 to $332,347.  As for the really rich, the numbers are truly staggering: in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars, the household income of the top 0.01% (roughly, the nation’s 13,000 richest households) increased by about seven-fold, from less than $5 million to more than $30 million per year.

Of course, some of Trump’s appeal is based on his willingness to exploit racism and xenophobia while speaking to the economic anxieties of white middle and working class voters.  But establishment politicians are making a big mistake when they under-estimate the extent to which Trump’s message – crude and bombastic as it is — that Americans were winners but are now losers, resonates with the actual life experience of so many people.

These people are angry about what has happened to them and their communities, and especially angry about the empty promises of a Republican party that is run for the almost exclusive benefit of the rich.  The half of America that gets along on $40,000, or $25,000, or $10,000 per year doesn’t care about cutting capital gains taxes or getting rid of the estate tax (which already exempts the “first” $11 million of a married couple’s wealth), and it isn’t enthusiastic about slashing Social Security and Medicare either.

To the contrary, all these things are the pet projects of the Republican donor class.  For forty years the GOP has managed to manipulate culture war issues and racial and ethnic animosities to hide from its base two facts: the contemporary Republican party exists to protect the economic interests of that class, and those interests don’t actually align with the economic interests of middle- and working-class Americans, even if they happen to be white and culturally conservative.

That it took a shameless foul-mouthed egomaniacal reality TV star to speak this truth in such a way that Republican voters would hear it is a sad comment on the state of our politics and culture.

And here is David Hare, writing in the Guardian, reflecting on what happened in Britain with Thatcher and what came after:

As the years have passed, the contradictions within conservatism have seemed to reach some kind of breaking point at which it is very hard to see how its central tenets can continue to make sense. Admittedly, since the severe recession brought about by the banks, Conservative administrations have found favour with the electorate while Labour has languished. At the election a year ago, Conservatives did somehow scrape together votes from almost 24% of the electorate. But such an outcome has done nothing to shake my basic conviction. In its essential thinking, the Tory project is bust.

The origins of conservatism’s modern incoherence lie with Thatcher. Whatever your view of her influence, she was different from her predecessors in her degree of intellectuality. She was unusually interested in ideas. Groomed by Chicago economists, she believed that Britain, robbed of the easy commercial advantages of its imperial reach, could thenceforth only prosper if it became competitive with China, with Japan, with America and with Germany. For this reason, in 1979, a crackpot theory called monetarism was briefly put into practice and allowed to wreak the havoc that destroyed one fifth of British industry. As soon as this futile theory had been painfully discredited, Conservative minds switched to obsessing on what they really wanted: the promotion and propagation of the so-called free market. If a previous form of patrician conservatism had been about respectability and social structure, this new form was about replacing all notions of public enterprise with a striving doctrine of individualism.

It is painful to point out how completely this grafting of foreign ideas onto the British economy has failed. The financial crash of 2008 dispelled once and for all the ingenious theory of the free market. The only thing, ideologues had argued, that could distort a market was the imposition of unnecessary rules and regulations by a third party, which had no vested interest in the outcome of the transaction and that was therefore a meddling force that robbed markets of their magnificent, near-mystical wisdom. These meddling forces were called governments. The flaw in the theory became apparent as soon as it was proved, once and for all, that irresponsible behaviour in a market did not simply affect the parties involved but could also, thanks to the knock-on effects of modern derivatives, bring whole national economies to their knees. The crappy practices of the banks did not punish only the guilty. Over and over, they punished the innocent far more cruelly. The myth of the free market had turned out to be exactly that: a myth, a Trotsykite fantasy, not real life.

David Cameron arrived in office aware that a conservatism that was purely economic could not possibly meet the needs of the country, and therefore chose to advance an unlikely system of volunteerism, which he called the “big society”. It was, self-evidently, a palliative, nothing more, the lazy shrug of a faltering conscience, and one that predictably lasted no longer than the life cycle of a mosquito. Alert to a problem, Cameron lacked the fortitude to pursue its solution. Instead, Conservative ministers have fallen back on the more familiar, far more routine strategy of sour rhetoric, petulantly blaming the people for their failure to live up to the promise of their leaders’ policies. Do you have to be my age to remember a time when politicians aimed to lead, rather than to lecture? Is anyone old enough to recall a government whose ostensible mission was to serve us, not to improve us? When did magnanimity cease to be one of those famous British virtues we are ordered to share?

The reason we have been governed so badly is because government has been in the hands of those who least believe in it. Politicians have become little more than go-betweens, their principal function to hand over taxpayers’ assets, always in car boot sales and always at way less than market value. No longer having faith in their own competence, politicians have blithely surrendered the state’s most basic duties. Even the care and detention of prisoners, and thereby the protection of citizens from danger, has been given to contractors, as though the state no longer trusted itself to open a gate, build a wall, or serve a three-course meal. With foreign policy delegated to Washington, and consciences delegated by private contract to callous logistics companies, no wonder the profession of politics in Britain is having a nervous breakdown of its own making.

There is a bleak fatalism at the heart of conservatism, which has been codified into the lie that the market can only do what the market does, and that we must therefore watch powerless. We have seen the untruth of this in the successful interventions governments have recently made on behalf of the rich. Now we long for many more such interventions on behalf of everyone else. Often, in the past 40 years, I refused to contemplate writing plays that might imply that public idealism was dead. From observing the daily lives of those in public service, I know this not to be true. But we lack two things: new ways of channelling such idealism into practical instruments of policy, and a political class that is not disabled by its philosophy from the job of realising them. If we talk seriously about British values, then the noblest and most common of them all used to be the conviction that, with will and enlightenment, historical change could be managed. We did not have to be its victims. Its cruelties could be mitigated. Why, then, is the current attitude that we must surrender to it? I had asked this question at the Oxford Playhouse in 1974 as I walked back down a darkened Beaumont Street to a hotel of draped velvet curtains, power outages and guttering candles. I ask it again today.

“The Tory project is bust.” The Republican myth of the Money Party has been exposed as a “fantastic lie.” You get the picture. It’s the same the world over. Here’s Andrew Coyne in the National Post reflecting on all that has gone wrong, from a conservative Canadian’s perspective:

Across North America, the right is in disarray. It isn’t only at the ballot box that conservatives are in retreat. It is in the broader contest of ideas. On issue after issue, the left has been running the table, whether overturning orthodoxies long considered invincible, like the taboo on deficits, or opening new territory for the expanding state, from pensions to pharmacare to a guaranteed annual income.

Perhaps the most startling advances have come in the social issues. From same-sex marriage to legalized marijuana to assisted suicide, public opinion and legislation seem in a headlong race to see which can undo centuries of custom and precedent the fastest, while across the multiplying fronts in the wars of identity — racial, sexual and the rest — one famous victory follows another.

I do not say this is a good thing or a bad thing. Some of these developments are welcome, some are not. I record it only as a fact. The energy, the impetus, the advantage today is all on the left.

Even what I thought in my election post might be an opportunity for the right, the growing divide between a party of the state and a party of the private sector, is probably a total non-starter politically. In the 1990s a study was done that showed that the number one indicator for someone voting Republican was a job in the private sector. What to do then when that primary source of identity has so signally betrayed its constituency? It is, after all, the private sector that has failed the people the most: through globalization and the gutting of unions wages have been driven down relentlessly, while the biggest winners have been areas like finance and tech, two of the hardest-charging horsemen of economic inequality. Not coincidentally, the Democrats in the U.S. have become the party of the financial sector, with Hillary Clinton presiding at the Senator from Wall Street.

Government still can’t get things done, and certainly doesn’t care a whole lot about the declining incomes of the middle class, but the private sector can’t, or won’t, create decent jobs and cares even less. Indeed, if you’re a member of the 0.1 % you’re content to kill as many jobs as possible and hide your money somewhere offshore where you don’t have to pay taxes. And so enter Trump, who is not so much racist as he is against immigrants (legal or otherwise) “stealing” American jobs. It’s hardly surprising there are a lot of people with him on this.

In brief, core conservative issues have either been largely co-opted (as economic policy) or tossed into the dustbin of history (the social issues of the culture wars). What is left? Nationalism. “Family values.” Small government. This is thin gruel, and in order to separate themselves from the Democrats the Republicans have had to take such issues to an unrealistic and increasingly irrelevant extreme. Nationalism means building walls, banning immigration, and tearing up trade agreements. Family values has something to do with transgender bathrooms. Small government actually plays out as anti-government. Our elected representatives, it seems, are now widely viewed as incapable of behaving responsibly. According to the reporting of Will Hutton every act of what Ted Cruz refers to as the “Washington cartel” is now seen by the Republican base as being  by definition bad. According to his own public comments, ex-prime minister Stephen Harper thought there was no such thing as a good tax. Government, in short, is so despised that it even hates itself!

But who believes a return to the days of small government is possible? We’re well past the point of being able to downsize. There’s no getting rid of entitlement programs now, or any way to shrink the public sector. The comparison to events in Canada is instructive. When Tim Hudak went down in flames to Liberal Kathleen Wynne in the Ontario provincial election in 2014, despite a depressing and well-documented history of Liberal incompetence and mismanagement, it was in large part due to his announcing a desire to prune 100,000 public sector jobs. This was certainly a bold throwing down of the gauntlet, but running against the public sector unions was a losing strategy. What’s more, even if Hudak had won, he would not have been able to make such cuts. Attrition and buyouts would have ended up costing the government more than just maintaining things as they were.

The same systemic resistance to change can be seen in the federal Liberal promises to reform the Senate and electoral system. Nothing is going to happen. Let’s face it: we are stuck with an unelected, unrepresentative, expensive and totally useless Senate and a first-past-the-post election system, probably forever. This is the very definition of political sclerosis. The resulting feelings of frustrated impotence just drive greater anger toward party establishments on all points of the political compass. Perhaps aware of the disappointing results from the “hope and change” presidency of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party this time around is offering none of either. The very best you can expect is more of the same.

This resistance to change may, paradoxically, be what is needed to effect a transformation. As David Brooks opined in the New York Times, while reflecting on the failures of old-style conservatism (which he identifies with the policies of Ronald Reagan), it may finally be time for a paradigm shift:

This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative. For decades now the Republican Party has been groaning under the Reagan orthodoxy, which was right for the 1980s but has become increasingly obsolete. The Reagan worldview was based on the idea that a rising economic tide would lift all boats. But that’s clearly no longer true.

We’ve gone from Rising Tide America to Coming Apart America. Technological change, globalization and social and family breakdown mean that the benefits of growth, to the extent there is growth, are not widely shared.

Republicans sort of recognize this reality, but they are still imprisoned in the Reaganite model. They ask Reaganite questions, propose Reaganite policies and have Reaganite instincts.

Now along comes Donald Trump, an angel of destruction, to blow it all to smithereens. He represents not only a rejection of the existing Reaganite establishment, but also a rejection of Reaganite foreign policy (he is less globalist) and Reaganite domestic policy (he is friendlier to the state).

Trumpism will not replace Reaganism, though. Trump is prompting what Thomas Kuhn, in his theory of scientific revolutions, called a model crisis.

According to Kuhn, intellectual progress is not steady and gradual. It’s marked by sudden paradigm shifts. There’s a period of normal science when everybody embraces a paradigm that seems to be working. Then there’s a period of model drift: As years go by, anomalies accumulate and the model begins to seem creaky and flawed.

Then there’s a model crisis, when the whole thing collapses. Attempts to patch up the model fail. Everybody is in anguish, but nobody knows what to do.

That’s where the Republican Party is right now. Everybody talks about being so depressed about Trump. But Republicans are passive and psychologically defeated. That’s because their conscious and unconscious mental frameworks have just stopped working. Trump has a monopoly on audacity, while everyone else is immobile.

Well, we certainly seem to have come to the end of something. The myths and lies are being exposed, as is a record of nearly fifty years of failure. I think this is what Trump supporters are responding to in his message, more than the dog-whistle note of racism and xenophobia. Of course Trump can’t do anything, and quite possibly doesn’t want to do anything, to ameliorate the condition of the failing middle class (they are, after all, the “losers” in his simple social vision), but at least he’s calling the system and the establishment to account. As Jim Sleeper observes, his success

upstaged both political establishments’ hypocrisies, without any proof that he would or could actually curb offshore tax evasion and outsourced jobs. What he has done is expose our political system’s illegitimacy and unsustainability as no nominee has done since 1932.

In the end, however, it doesn’t matter whether you’re on the left or the right, as Thomas Frank argues:

Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart. . . . Our airports are, like, Third World.”

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

The point being made by all of the observers I’ve been quoting is much the same: we’re witnessing the total failure of what have been sustaining political myths for the past half century. This is what conservative editor R. R. Reno has called the collapse of the middle-class consensus. It is a moment fraught with danger. Society has to have confidence in its governing institutions, has to have some belief in progress. We need hope and change. Without them we have the kind of implosion that conservative parties in Canada and the U.S. have experienced, with truly wretched, demagogic personalities taking their parties down in flames. This has left a path open for nominally centrist, establishment, status quo parties to flow into the vacuum. By this process of political osmosis, however, the collapse of conservatism has also led to a paradoxical lurch to the right.

Why? Because, as Frank points out, the traditional parties of the left know that voters have nowhere else to go and so feel no sense of responsibility to them. There is no alternative, as the saying goes. And so conservatism’s fall has taken the entire system with it. Historically unpopular and seriously flawed figures like Kathleen Wynne and Hillary Clinton could never get elected but for clownish opponents like Tim Hudak and Donald Trump. Government is devolving by degrees of lesser evil.

I am not, politically, a conservative person. But all the same I take no pleasure in witnessing the self-destruction of conservative parties in the West because I don’t see where they can begin to come back except through an increasingly angry and divisive form of politics that will ride a wave of popular resentment. We really are in a terrible mess.

Recent weeks have seen a rash of stories about the long dark night of the news business in Canada, with layoffs announced by Rogers Media and Postmedia as well as the closing of my own hometown daily, the Guelph Mercury, which began publishing in 1867.

The crisis in journalism has been a slow train wreck coming. If you’ve been inside a newsroom at any time in the past fifteen years you’ve been able to smell the despair and rock-bottom morale following on endless rounds of buyouts and layoffs. It’s also no secret what’s behind it all. People want all the news they want, and only the news they want, when they want it, and they want it for free. The Internet has been happy to oblige, even though “free” doesn’t mean that it comes with no strings attached. A decent overview of what’s been happening is provided by Brian Gorman’s Crash to Paywall: Canadian Newspapers and the Great Disruption.

Being a confirmed cyberpessimist, I’m not thrilled by these developments. In order to understand what it all means, and where we’re headed, I think it’s worth considering why it’s happening. What trends are driving these changes?

With that question in mind, I want to quote from Marty Baron, former editor of The Boston Globe and currently editor of the Washington Post, when he recently spoke to Neil Macdonald of the CBC:

“The greatest danger to a vigorous press today,” [Baron tells Macdonald], “comes from ourselves.

“The press is routinely belittled, badgered, harassed, disparaged, demonized, and subjected to acts of intimidation from all corners — including boycotts, threats of cancellations (or defunding, in the case of public broadcasting) …

“Our independence — simply posing legitimate questions — is seen as an obstacle to what our critics consider a righteous moral, ideological, political, or business agenda.

“In this environment, too many news organizations are holding back, out of fear — fear that we will be saddled with an uncomfortable political label, fear that we will be accused of bias, fear that we will be portrayed as negative, fear that we will lose customers, fear that advertisers will run from us, fear that we will be assailed as anti-this or anti-that, fear that we will offend someone, anyone.

“Fear, in short, that our weakened financial condition will be made weaker because we did something strong and right, because we simply told the truth and told it straight.”

To this Macdonald adds the following:

Any reporter who has, for example, ever been based in the Middle East, or has tried to bring some sensible context to a domestic audience whipped into fear about terror, terror, terror, has often seen the mettle of his or her managers tested to the limit.

When Baron’s Washington Post, along with The Guardian, revealed U.S. government lying and law-breaking, courtesy of whistleblower Edward Snowden, public outrage was mostly directed against the newspapers and Snowden himself.

This culture of fearfulness and timidity is depressing. I mentioned in a previous post the decision that had been made by major media outlets to close online commenting on any news story with a whiff of controversy about it (which is to say, mainly those involving a criminal trial or, as Macdonald notes, Middle East politics). Why? I guess fear of liability plays some part. But if Big Media can’t protect themselves from libel chill, who can? It seems as though those nasty trolls have ruined it for everyone. They’re so negative.

But in shutting down commenting we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater and reinforced the idea that criticism is to be shunned. As I noted above, on the Internet we only want the news we want. We don’t want to have any of our prejudices or preconceived notions questioned, or have to face a range of different opinions. Carried by these currents, the media, even the news media, turn into nothing but propaganda and advertising.

This past week there was a local example of how this works. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario’s local chapter said that because Waterloo Region Record columnist Luisa D’Amato allegedly pushes “anti-teacher rhetoric” in her columns for the paper they were calling on their membership to boycott the paper as well as to boycott the Newspaper in Education (NIE) program for the 2016-2017 school year, or to encourage school administrators not to renew the program. The NIE program uses newspapers in class to teach reading, writing, spelling and critical thinking.

No critical thinking allowed! No whistleblowers! No snark! Newspapers as a “safe space”! No news but the news we want to read! This is the not-so-brave world the Internet has brought us, the world of no “dislike” icons and no commenting on stories where opinions may upset anyone. While we’re at it, we might also ban negative book reviews (this is a pet peeve issue of mine). Only for “negative” we might read “critical,” as it comes to the same thing. But, as Baron says, the media is paralyzed with “the fear that [they] will be portrayed as negative.”

Hell, we can also get strict about not allowing heckling in parliament. Wouldn’t government work so much better if everybody just agreed to get along? And during political campaigns, let’s make sure none of the candidates “go negative”! Town halls and debates should be a safe space too!

And people are surprised at the popularity of figures like Donald Trump?

It’s embarrassing that we’ve come to this. The classic defence of freedom of speech is that it is a political right, involving the free flow and expression of ideas in a democracy. It was a right that was essential to the spirit of the Enlightenment, that spirit that asked us to question everything: every authority, every traditional belief, every party line. Instead the press are afraid that they will be “assailed as anti-this or anti-that,” afraid “that we will offend someone, anyone.”

Being an active, engaged citizen means you have to be anti-something, otherwise you’re not really for anything. The press is supposed to always be on the offensive. And the kinds of speech I’m talking about here are precisely the kind — that is, political — that need to be encouraged more. I’m not invoking “freedom of expression” to defend gangbang videos. But the ineluctable current of digital media seems to be toward hive-mind consensus and automatically liking things, a rot that has now spread throughout our political discourse at the highest level. At this rate, when the last newspaper shuts its doors will there be anyone left who cares?

This past week saw the opening of the case against Jian Ghomeshi on multiple counts of sexual assault, and it did not go well for the Crown. In the eyes of many that would be to put it mildly, as the defence used private emails from the first two complainants to raise concerns about their reliability and credibility as witnesses. In doing so, important questions also arose over the prosecution and defence of such cases in general.

This morning I was looking forward to going online and reading discussion of what happened, as well as commentary on its broader meaning. When I say “discussion” what I’m mainly referring to is not news coverage so much as public discussion in the comment threads that typically follow news articles on the Internet. I don’t comment myself on these, but I do like to see what other people are thinking and to take note of any trends and divisions taking shape in the public mind.

I was disappointed. In recent months, public commenting on news stories has become an endangered activity. In 2015 both Sun Media and the Toronto Star disallowed commenting on their websites. Other news sites will allow commenting on some stories but disable comments on anything smelling of controversy (that is, the stories that usually attract the most comments). As a general rule, criminal cases or anything involving Israel stand at the top of the list of taboo subjects.

And so I went looking in vain for some indication of what ordinary people were thinking about the Ghomeshi case. There were a few op-ed pieces in the Star but, as noted, you can’t comment on the Star website. There were also a couple of op-eds in the Globe and Mail, but the comments were closed on both of them, as well as on any story relating to the trial. Christine Blatchford’s reportage on the trial at the National Post, as well as any other story about the proceedings at the Post, have their comments disabled. The CBC’s Ghomeshi coverage does not allow commenting. Even across the pond the British Guardian did not allow any comments on its Ghomeshi story. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, Thou Shalt Not publicly express an opinion on these matters that has not been studiously vetted and approved.

I can see some of where this is coming from. These sources don’t want to be liable for everything said on their websites, though I’m unsure of just how liable they would be. A story like the Ghomeshi case might be expected to bring out the worst in troll behaviour, and board moderators might be expected to put in some overtime overseeing heated discussions.

But that said, I think this is a terrible loss. Open discussion of important, controversial current events was one of the great things the Internet brought to news coverage. Sure there are some bad apples, but I’ve found lots of informed, intelligent, provocative discussion in news threads, just as I find a lot of anonymous Amazon product reviews quite helpful. On occasion I’ve even seen the authors of op-eds forced to backtrack when shown to be wrong by anonymous posters with silly avatars and made-up names. Meanwhile, discussion of topics like foreign policy and criminal law, however heated, speak to the essence of the rationale behind the preservation of free speech: promoting greater engagement with politics and civil society.

What is the alternative? Only allowing acceptable, mainstream opinions to be expressed publicly? Are the rest of us just to be satisfied with commenting on celebrities (as long as we don’t say anything too negative) and arguing over who’s going to win the SuperBowl? Is criticism to be neutered, leaving us only with Facebook’s thumbs-up “like” icon (with no “dislike” available)? Are comment threads just a tool for driving up website traffic and selling stuff? I often hear complaints about how trashy, tabloid infotainment, click bait, and listicles dominate Internet “news,” but if that’s all that the public are allowed to engage with, while “hard news” remains in a roped-off V.I.P. reserve, who can blame us?

It’s a depressing trend that I can’t see any end to. Which leads me to ask: Did the trolls win?

Well, in my post a week earlier I said my predictions almost always turn out wrong, so I wasn’t surprised, or terribly disappointed, by the election results. For the record, I predicted a Conservative minority. In the final week the polls indicated a strong Liberal swing to the vote and this turned out to be an accurate reading. Overall, I thought the Conservatives ran a dreadful campaign, while the other parties just waited for the tide to come in. In the event, I didn’t vote Liberal myself, but I’m glad to see the end of Stephen Harper.

I’m sure more will be added to the already large literature about Harper in the years to come. I’m still not sure why someone who was by most accounts aware of his deep personal unpopularity insisted on re-branding the federal Conservative party as the “Harper government” (and the “Harper party” in the words of the Globe and Mail this morning). In the words of John Ibbotson, “No prime minister in history and no political party have been loathed as intensely as Stephen Harper and the Conservative party.” But the two didn’t have to go together.

It’s one thing to want to rule as an autocrat, as a “party of one” in the phrase of Michael Harris, but to be so in-your-face about it is another. Perhaps it was all part of Harper’s divisive game plan, to pander to his base while repelling everyone else. If so, it was a strategy that backfired. As I said in my earlier post, Harper’s base politics can only work given certain conditions, like a divided opposition in a first-past-the-post system. He enjoyed that for his entire tenure, but the Anybody But Harper vote undid him this time (as well as undoing the fortunes of the NDP). This leaves the federal Conservative party vulnerable. As Jeffrey Simpson commented just a few days before the election:

Conservatives have their voters – their core – and that’s it. Their core isn’t large enough to win again. . . . When Rob Ford and his brother Doug are organizing a late rally for the party in Toronto, and the federal party thinks this is just fine, the message is clear: The party is down to its hard core.

It didn’t have to be this way. Canada is, in many ways, a conservative (small “c”) country. But the party’s leadership has been hijacked in the twenty-first century by angry freaks. Stephen Harper like Tim Hudak in Ontario, or even Rob Ford in Toronto could have been a more successful, effective political leader if he’d just been moderately reasonable. But being reasonable isn’t what any of these guys signed on for. They preferred to play ideologues and idiots (or actually were ideologues and idiots). Not one of them could be considered, and this is an important quality for a politician, normal. As I also indicated in my earlier post, the same thing can be said of the current Republican field in the United States. The right has spent years pandering to its base. That base now holds it hostage.

As far as the election around here went, the Liberal candidate won handily. One thing that surprises me, looking back on the last two elections, is the end of canvassing. In the last provincial election the only party that sent people door-to-door was the Green party (and that wasn’t the candidate himself but a volunteer from out of town). This year none of the candidates, or representatives from their party, came through my neighbourhood to knock on doors. None! And I only received two telephone calls in the lead up to the election. Do candidates no longer have the resources to do this kind of thing? What else are they doing with their time?

Moving forward, I’m not confident that the Liberals will provide much in the way of new ideas or leadership. One hopes for competence at best. Still, I’m interested in how a couple of issues that came up during the campaign will be handled. First, the Liberals declared that they were against the first-past-the-post election system. Now that they have a majority, will they backtrack on that? Second, the Liberals have also said that they want to “reform” the Senate (I’m all on board). This will be harder to effect, but I think would be a popular move. That said, I don’t expect any meaningful changes to be made to the current system.

I guess another way of saying this is that while Justin Trudeau’s governing style will likely be much different from Harper’s, I question how far apart he will be on substance. This isn’t being cynical, but is more just a reflection on modern politics, where it is very hard to effect real change. This is a problem, because in at least some ways this country should be looking to change direction. In ways that count, I don’t think it will.

Political punditry potpourri

We are now a week away from a federal election.

What I’ve been wondering about over the course of the campaign is what has happened to conservatism.

This summer the Republican primaries in the United States have been dominated by Donald Trump, a candidate that almost no one takes seriously. His success thus far has been attributed to causes such as the anger felt by most Americans at the political system (as a non-politician Trump can market himself as an outsider) and the public’s fascination with celebrity, which keeps everything Trump says and does at the top of the news cycle.

Another reason for his success may be the weakness of the rest of the very large Republican field. At one point there were seventeen declared candidates, and taken as a group they are an unattractive, uninspiring lot. Perhaps what’s most surprising is that only a few of them seem capable of speaking convincingly on any subject (a talent that eludes Trump as well). I thought giving speeches was the one thing politicians had to know how to do. Someone forgot to tell Jeb Bush.

But the bigger problem with the Republicans may be that a particular historical strand of American conservatism has played itself out. In terms of cultural conservatism it seems as though the “culture wars” are, if not over, at least moving into a new, yet-to-be-determined phase. The right to an abortion is now settled, and the fight over gay marriage mostly is too. Human-driven climate change is a fact accepted by everyone who is not a complete idiot. The idea that the U.S. can build a wall separating itself from Mexico (or Canada), and somehow round up all its illegal immigrants and send them back to their countries of origin is laughable. And yet all of this can be found in the platforms of leading Republican candidates.

When it comes to economic or fiscal conservatism the picture is just as bleak for right-wing politicians. In a nutshell: what advantage do they offer over the center or center-left? Economic inequality has continued to grow unabated under Democratic presidents, and it seems very unlikely that Hillary Clinton will do anything to stop these trends. If you’re a member of the 1%, or 0.1%, or the 0.01%, you have nothing to worry about: the Dems have your back. If you want to say that neoliberalism won the battle for ideas I don’t think that would be far from the mark (leaving aside the question of what such a victory means). And that being so, what is there to mobilize right-wing voters who are fiscal conservatives?

In short, the conservative movement has found itself left behind on almost every issue. This doesn’t mean they’re doomed to irrelevancy, far from it, but it does mean that either they or the world will need to change course in some dramatic way for them to regain power. And I am inclined to think it’s the world that is more likely to change first.

Where does this leave conservatives? Primarily as an anti-government party. This is a ridiculous position for any national political party to take, but in at least one sense it may have some traction. I sense a growing divide between public (unionized) and private sector workers both in Canada and the U.S. that could make for a coming split between a party of the state and a party of everyone else. If there is a future for the right it may be here.

In Canada the Conservative Party, or as it insists upon branding itself, the Harper government, is similarly bankrupt of ideas. The most depressing aspect (thus far) of the campaign has been the attention given over to the “issue” of the niqab. This is pure dog-whistle politics, a waving of the bloody shirt (or veil) that apparently came from Lynton Crosby, a political guru who specializes in this kind of thing. It’s not even a minor issue. It’s a non-issue. It literally affects no one. And yet voters, particularly in Quebec, have seemed to respond.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that Harper still has two big advantages going in to the election.

In the first place there is the first-past-the-post election system. This archaic and undemocratic form of politics explains the Conservative campaign philosophy, which goes by different names but is usually referred to as Roveism (after Karl Rove) or “base politics.” Given the way the vote on the nominal left is split among several different parties the Conservatives can, in theory, not only win but win a majority with less than 30% of the popular vote. All they have to do is appeal to a hard core of support, which they can do by waving the bloody shirt and complaining that anything they’ve done wrong (the F-35s, the Senate scandals, the Robocalls) is all just a smokescreen of lies being sent up by the liberal media.

Such a strategy would be disastrous in a system of proportional representation, turning that hard core of support into a fringe movement. But we’re not playing by those rules.

The second advantage the Conservatives have is the fact that they are the party out of power in most of the provinces. In particular, their traditional stronghold in Alberta recently elected a premier from the NDP and the key province of Ontario is led by the deeply unpopular government of liberal Kathleen Wynne, who won the last provincial election, and a majority government, due only to the sheer incompetence of the Conservative candidate, Tim Hudak. I think voters like for there to be some conflict between their provincial and federal governments as a way of providing checks and balances, so this is something that I think works in Harper’s favour.

I voted in an advance poll. There were seven candidates in my riding: the four major parties, plus a Communist, a Libertarian, and one of the few candidates nation-wide for the Radical Marijuana Party. Waiting in line to vote (reports of long waiting times at the polls turned out to be accurate, as I was standing and sitting in line for nearly an hour), I spoke to the people standing directly in front of and behind me. One was a tech worker and the other a retired military man. Both had been Conservatives in the past but despised Harper and had specifically come out to vote against him, mainly on the grounds of his managerial incompetence. The riding has a long history of being Liberal, though the sitting MP is not running again in this election. I would say the Liberal is a shoo-in to win, but a popular liberal mayor was recently defeated by a hard-right candidate in our last municipal election so I wouldn’t be too sure.

So here’s my prediction on the federal election, offered up with that caveat that I’ve nearly always been wrong in the past and will probably be wrong this time as well:

Despite polls showing the Liberals clearly in the lead and gaining momentum, and much talk about “strategic voting,” I think the Anybody But Harper vote is so fragmented the Conservatives will be able to get re-elected with a minority, but won’t be able to govern, that task falling to a coalition of the Liberals and NDP.

In another week I’ll be back with some thoughts on what happened.

Political punditry potpourri

Here we go again.

It’s been a week now since the Umpqua Community College shootings, when 26-year-old Christopher Harper-Mercer, a student at the college, fatally shot nine people and injured nine others on the campus before killing himself when the police arrived.

His mother, Laurel Harper, was a proud gun afficionado and bragged of keeping loaded handguns and assault rifles in the house (guns that Christopher would take with him to school on the fateful day).

Here’s an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times story describing their relationship:

Reina Webb, 19, recalls how closely his mother would keep an eye on him, which to her, “was kind of weird, because he seemed like a grown man.”

She remembers how his mom had to calm him the day he found that someone had slashed the tires on his bike. “He had a fit almost,” Webb said. “Almost like a tantrum, like a kid. . . . He was upset, crying and doing all that stuff because of the tires on his bike.”

Other times, neighbors could hear him in the family’s apartment yelling at his mother as she tried to calm him down. “He would get mad if things weren’t his way,” Webb said. “But she always had him in control.”

Although she never interacted with Harper-Mercer, Webb remembers his mother as a “really nice lady.” “She’d always talk to everybody, say hello and be super nice and always try and watch her son,” Webb said. “She always tried to take care of him.”

Does this scenario sound familiar? It should. Yes, Harper-Mercer was yet another bitter loser, unable to get a girlfriend and with a hate-on for the entire world. But he’s also an example of the boy in the basement, a type I have already written about.

Laurel Harper, in turn, fits the stereotype of the enabling mom perfectly. You can check the items off the list: a single mom (widow or divorced), focusing all of her life on her (adult) baby boy; someone with a background as a professional caregiver (Laurel Harper is employed as a nurse); someone who gave in completely to the idea that her son was suffering from some kind of vague mental/psychological/social/emotional disability (here apparently Asperger’s Syndrome, though I don’t know what evidence there was for that).

Just as the report into the Sandy Hook killings concluded, it all led to a pattern of appeasement, enablement, and accommodation. As it did with Nancy Lanza. As it did with Wenche Behring (another divorced nurse looking after her adult son). Here’s how I concluded my review of One of Us: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre in Norway:

Living such an isolated life, Breivik needed very little assistance. He received it, again as so often is the case, from his unhappy, damaged mother. And this is probably the only takeaway. If we’re to recognize the warning signs and draw lines around such people, that’s a process that has to start at home.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in psychology to see where these situations are heading. As I said at the end of my earlier post: know the signs and keep your distance.

Why does Canada have a Senate?

Not to operate as a chamber of “sober second thought,” in John D. MacDonald’s deathless words. Senators have almost no legislative or political function, which, I would like to emphasize, is as it should be. They are an unelected body of party hacks who have been placed in comfortable public sinecures, and as such should not be allowed to meddle in the political process. The Senate is a body modeled after the British House of Lords, which itself has no place in a modern democracy.

In all fairness, I think most senators realize this. And they do a good job of doing nothing. Claire Hoy’s Nice Work exposed their uselessness years ago.

Even if you do see the Senate as having a function, the idea that the dirty rabble of democracy needs to be guided over by a wealthy and paternalistic Establishment was a fossilized notion already in 1867. The United States Constitution originally had senators elected by state legislatures — which, while indirect, was at least a notionally democratic process — up until 1913, when the Seventeenth Amendment provided for their direct election by the people. In other words, the American system was always more progressive than the one our own Constitution provided for (drafted over 70 years later), and was still considered politically out of date before the outbreak of the First World War. Meanwhile, we’ve thought it best to keep with the old ways.

So why does Canada have a Senate?

Not because anyone wants there to be a Senate. Stephen Harper has attempted to either abolish or reform it, only to be slapped down by the Supreme Court. An embarrassed Justin Trudeau removed Liberal senators from that party’s caucus (they now call themselves Senate Liberals instead of Liberal Senators). Abolishment of the Senate is a longstanding part of the NDP platform. The Greens want to make it an elected body based on proportional representation. Nobody wants to keep it in its current form. Except, I guess, the senators themselves.

But reform is a dead letter. Every attempt to reform the Senate since the 1970s, and there have been many, has failed. Change is never going to come.

This does not upset me. I would not like to see an elected, more effective, or otherwise reformed Senate. What purpose would a reformed Senate have? It would either be redundant or lead to gridlock, and would certainly be more expensive to maintain (and lead to even more electioneering). Who thinks Canada needs more politicians? What problems does Canada currently face for which more politicians will provide the answer?

If reform is a dead letter, abolition is a pipe dream. According to the Supreme Court abolition could only happen with the unanimous consent of the provinces and the Senate itself. In short, they’d have to vote themselves out of existence. It’s even questionable whether the house can be allowed to simply grow old and die of natural causes. The Constitution may require we maintain it.

Why does Canada have a Senate? Because we were saddled with this house of shame by a bunch of wannabe aristos in the nineteenth century and now it can’t be gotten rid of. Ever.

And so, as the Senate continues to wallow in scandal, we the people are left to follow the trials and tribulations of figures like Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin on TV and in the newspapers. Excess and entitlement for the Establishment. For the plebs it’s broken crackers, cold camembert, and circuses.

Universities are odd institutions. They come in many different shapes and sizes, from local community colleges to huge multinational corporations. They can be state-run or private, highly specialized or more general in scope. They can even exist wholly online. They began in the middle ages, but today bear almost no relation to their earliest incarnations. And if signs are any indication, their evolution will continue to take them in strange new directions.

The last several years have seen a great deal of soul-searching within the halls of academe. One of the sparks was the claim made by a hedge fund manager and venture capitalist that universities were an economic “bubble,” selling a product at an unreasonable and unsustainable price through the assistance of government loans. Such a charge led to a flood of books attempting to explain what had gone wrong. In Canada the sociologists James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar (authors of Ivory Tower Blues and Lowering Higher Education) are two of the more popular commentators.

Various villains have been identified. Some, like Camille Paglia, continue to blame trends like post-structuralism and cultural relativism for having hollowed out the core mission of higher education. Others blame the “massification” of higher ed, the explosive post-World War 2 growth of universities to the point where they now admit far too many unqualified and uninterested students. Some accuse the government of cutting funding. Still others point the finger at the swelling ranks and salaries of a non-teaching administrative class within the universities. And then there are those who blame the adoption of a neo-liberal, market-oriented philosophy by institutions that (they feel) must stand outside such a framework.

I’ve followed much of the debate, and it saddens me. The humanities are, frankly, losing, and they aren’t even putting up a good fight. I tried to address some of the points being made in my joint review of Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature and John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? The depressing takeaway from Carey’s book is that the arts aren’t good for much at all. The usual platitudes are trotted out: how the humanities encourage independent, critical thinking and make us more empathic and active citizens, but this just isn’t true. I can’t help thinking that if humanities professors, trained in disciplines like history, philosophy and rhetoric, can’t put forward better arguments for what we might call higher education’s traditional mission, then perhaps it’s time to give up. In a recent piece appearing in the Guardian, one pro-humanities spokesperson, Sarah Churchwell, had this to say:

“What has changed radically in the last 10 years is that they’re trying to turn everything into a for-profit business,” said Churchwell. “And that’s bullshit. Universities are not for profit. We are charitable institutions. What they’re now doing is saying to academics: ‘You have to be the fundraisers, the managers, the producers, you have to generate the incomes that will keep your institutions afloat.’ Is that really what society wants – for everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity? Maybe I’m just out of step with the world, but what some of us are fighting for is the principle that not everything that is valuable can or should be monetised. That universities are one of the custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration. That education is not a commodity, it’s a qualitative transformation. You can’t sell it. You can’t simply transfer it.”

Churchwell went on to talk about what would be lost if we didn’t stand in the way of this systematic destruction of the traditional liberal education. “Virtually every cabinet minister has a humanities degree,” she said. “And I think there’s something quite sinister about it: they get their leadership positions after studying the humanities and then they tell us that what we need is a nation of technocrats. If you look at the vast majority of world leaders, you’ll find that they’ve got humanities degrees. Angela Merkel is the only one who’s a scientist. The ruling elite have humanities degrees because they can do critical thinking, they can test premises, they can think outside the box, they can problem-solve, they can communicate, they don’t have linear, one-solution models with which to approach the world. You won’t solve the problems of religious fundamentalism with a science experiment.”

This is entirely unconvincing. Critical thinking certainly isn’t the preserve of the humanities. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if today’s arts departments even encourage it. And while I’m as dejected as Churchwell at the thought of people wanting “everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity,” I don’t think it’s realistic to see such giant corporations (which is what universities are) as standing outside the larger economy. As recent strikes at York University and the University of Toronto have highlighted, universities can be seen as a microcosm of that dysfunctional larger economy, with its widening split between a privileged elite at the top (enjoying high pay, job security, benefits and pension) and a growing underclass whose sub-minimum wage labour supports the whole enterprise.

It’s very common now to decry the “corporatization” of universities and emphasize their “charity” status (at least for state-funded schools), but how honest are such claims? This past week saw the release of Ontario’s “Sunshine List” of public sector workers making over $100,000 a year. Perhaps the most common defense of such high salaries — after the remarkable claim, made by many, that because of inflation a $100,000 annual salary, which doesn’t include benefits, “isn’t very much” — is that they have to be “competitive” with the private sector. I suppose this makes sense in some fields (though surely not for professors in the humanities), but one has to ask to what extent a public sector in competition with the private sector is still truly public. At the very least it smacks of having one’s cake and eating it too.

Meanwhile, the real crisis facing higher education, as I see it, is the constriction of the middle class: their falling (real) wages and stagnant standards of living. A university education used to be a step on the ladder of upward mobility, but while that’s still true in some cases, more and more it’s a step on a ladder to nowhere, and it comes at a staggering cost. When I was at university nearly thirty years ago it was not hard to find an easy summer job that would pay tuition, school supplies, rent, and groceries. That’s no longer the case for young people today, who are graduating with incredible amounts of debt. And the old certainty that even if you didn’t walk into your dream job you at least were sure of finding some kind of meaningful work when you graduated has gone as well, most dramatically in the case of humanities graduates because the cultural economy has been gutted by the Internet.

But the problem isn’t one faced by humanities graduates alone. The advice to study the so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math) is no guarantee of finding a good career. Even “learning a trade” is little help. I know a lot of un- and underemployed contractors. The problem is one affecting young people generally, and faced with such a challenge there’s little wonder they’re becoming wary of higher education. Enrollments are indeed kept inflated thanks to the willingness of this generational cohort to take on high levels of debt, and because there is nowhere else for young people to go and nothing for them to do. That’s a terrible defense of higher education, but it’s the bottom line.

In a recent comeback fight in the UFC, Anderson “Spider” Silva, considered by many to be one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time, tested positive for performance enhancing drugs. The news has been met with expressions of shock. Silva himself has denied any doping. And maybe, just perhaps . . . But when are we going to stop being surprised by stories like this? Barry Bonds, Lance Armstrong . . . and these are only to name a couple of titans. Rumours have circulated for years about other major figures, even in sports like golf. But of course little has been proven. The reason for this is simple. Aside from the fact that people don’t really want to know (hey, some people insist that professional wrestling is “real to them”), doping is almost impossible to prove. Testing is expensive and easy to beat. The legal process is even more expensive, ultimately less conclusive, and interminable (the long-drawn out Roger Clemens story being one example). Armstrong often roared that he was “the most tested man in sports,” which was probably true. And he was doping all the time. It’s common knowledge that you have to screw up or be really stupid to get caught, which is why Armstrong could lie about it so loudly and for so long. Or why UFC president Dana White could berate journalists only a year ago for suggesting that any of the organization’s fighters were juicing. From Kevin Iole’s report:

Nearly two dozen reporters sat silently around a long conference table as Dana White challenged them. Give me a name of any fighter you think is on steroids, the UFC president spat, and I’ll have them drug tested today.

He held his flip phone open in the palm of his hand, ready to dial.

No one said a word as White shot hard glances at the reporters staring at him.

Give me a name, he demanded, and I’ll test them today, or don’t ever say it to me again. He was yelling, his face reddened, the fury evident. He sounded more like he was looking for a fight than trying to promote one.

“Give me one [expletive] name right now, I’ll get them on the phone, and somebody will drive to their [expletive] house today and will test them,” White said. “Say it. Say it.”

After pausing for a second to silence, he resumed.

“Then don’t ever [expletive] say it to me again,” he said, defiantly. “You guys like to play these [expletive] games. Let’s do it. I’m ready. I’m down. Let’s do this right now. Give me one name. Give me 10 names. Give me all the names you want; I’ll test all these [expletives] right now.”

The reporters remained silent. It’s not a reporter’s job to make news; it’s to report the news. But White was gunning for a fight.

He raved on, often shouting loudly, as he defended his fighters against claims their ranks are full of performance-enhancing drug users and his company against allegations that it turns a blind eye to their usage.

The best defence is a good offence, as they say. Given this state of affairs, it’s only reasonable to be sceptical. As a general guide, here are the big three tip-offs that someone is doping:

(1) The eye test: Much derided as unscientific, in fact it’s a pretty good diagnostic. You know what an impossible physique looks like. Just think of a professional bodybuilder. Forget about good genetics, a healthy diet, or a non-stop training regimen — the usual excuses that are trotted out. That’s all smoke.

(2) The fountain of youth: Physically, an athlete is in his prime in his late 20s. Sometime after 30 you start to go into a decline that gradually picks up speed, with no reversals. Drugs can arrest this inevitable effect of aging. So when you hear about a sports star who is experiencing a career “resurgence” or who is described as “ageless” and is still competing at an elite level against people ten or even twenty years younger than he is . . . that’s probably the drugs talking.

(3) Quick recovery: Has an athlete come back at spectacular speed from a gruesome/catastrophic/(supposedly) career-ending injury? Have they come back even stronger? No doubt that’s all due to their superstar doctors, or X-men mutant healing powers! Or maybe not. Perhaps it was the drugs. All of which is pretty obvious. But then, we only believe what we want to believe.

Why is the concept of conflict of interest so hard to understand? True, like any misdemeanour that has certain penalties attached to it, there is some room for debate when assessing culpability. But the thing is, we know it when we see it. And it’s precisely because we know it when we see it that we can say when it exists.

I say “exists” because conflict of interest is not a specific action or event. It doesn’t “occur.” One doesn’t have to actually do anything at all. Conflict of interest is a state of being. You are in a position where there is a conflict of interest or you are not.

This makes all the confusion over Amanda Lang’s “potential” conflict(s) of interest very strange. In brief, Lang, who is the chief financial correspondent for CBC news, has been hauled onto the carpet for supposedly trying to kill a story critical of the Royal Bank of Canada. Lang has accepted paid speaking engagements from the Royal Bank, went on to write an op-ed piece for the Globe and Mail on the subject (taking the bank’s side), and was in a relationship with an officer of the bank at the time.

A position of conflict? Of course. Writing in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, columnist George Monbiot even expressed amazement that “she remains employed by CBC, which has so far done nothing but bluster and berate its critics.”

This is probably a reference to a note from Jennifer McGuire, CBC’s general manager, seeking to “set the record straight.” If that was McGuire’s intention then she failed entirely. As did Lang herself, who had a remarkably tone-deaf piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail.

Lang writes that “it is painful to me that public perceptions of my integrity may have been compromised because I have been accused of acting improperly by allowing myself to be seen to have been in a conflict of interest.” This is a mind-wrenching circumlocution. Apparently her crime was not that of being in a conflict of interest. Instead, her improper action was to allow herself to be seen in such a conflict. Is Lang saying it’s only a crime if you get caught?

This may sound like nit-picking, but one suspects this is a piece that went through many, many drafts, every word of which was carefully parsed before submitting it for publication.

Nevertheless, Lang may have twisted herself into the truth, which is that in cases of conflict of interest, perception is everything. What I think confuses the matter is the use of terminology like “apparent,” “perceived,” and “potential” conflict of interest. These words shouldn’t apply. As I began by pointing out, conflict of interest isn’t an act, it’s a position one finds oneself in. And it is all a matter of perception: perceived conflict of interest (by an objective observer) is conflict of interest. When Lang responds to “exact allegations” of improper behaviour she’s changing the subject.

Lang goes on to say: “It did not occur to me that others would question my motivation. That they would raise doubts about my integrity. That they would believe my perspective on this story was affected, for example, either by a relationship or by the fact that I have spoken for pay at events organized by business groups and companies.”

So what? That Lang thought (and apparently still thinks) there was nothing wrong with what she was doing only tells us that she possesses a typically Canadian attitude about what it means to hold a position of power within any group or establishment (media, financial, or both, as the case may be): that it entitles you to do whatever you want without being questioned or criticized.

Those who say I acted improperly seem not to care that they, in effect, are alleging deeply unethical behaviour, or worse. I’m not sure how to convince people that my principles, integrity and career are fundamentally important to me, that I have no trouble understanding right from wrong and reporting honestly and independently. Unfortunately, it appears that I can assert that as long as I wish and still not overcome suspicions that originate from unshakeable and, in my view, utterly unwarranted presumptions of venal behaviour.

But the problem is not an allegation of any unethical behaviour. You certainly can question that in the present case, but it’s not necessary to do so. The problem is simply being in the position of a conflict of interest, not exercising that position in any unethical way. And the reason for having such a hard rule is simple: because in most cases proving any wrongdoing or quid pro quo is impossible. The accused can then simply respond with a blank denial and that’s the end of it.

As Monbiot registers, it’s easy to be cynical about the “impartial media” having become “mouthpieces for the elite.” And the fact that in Lang’s case this is happening with regard to public broadcasting makes it even worse. The public has, with some justification, little faith in the news media in general, but Caesar’s wife (the CBC) must be above suspicion. What makes the Lang story remarkable, at least to my eyes, is the obliviousness on the part of the CBC and Lang to there being anything wrong with what happened. As I’ve suggested, they may simply be taking for granted the culturally ingrained deference toward authority in this country: that our betters know better than we do what’s right and wrong. Or perhaps they’re taking the matter to the next level with a sort of “everybody does it because that’s the way the system operates” argument. Which may be true as well, but doesn’t help build trust.

Update, January 23 2015:

Media critic John Doyle, writing in the Globe and Mail, has this to say: “It’s always bracing when outsiders look at Canada, its cronyism and system of privilege. Monbiot is correct – it is grotesque. ”

Update, March 6 2015:

An internal review by the CBC has found that Lang’s reporting “met CBC’s journalistic standards.” The review did however find problems with the CBC’s conflict of interest policies, concluding that they were too open to interpretation. “Going forward, CBC News will ensure that all of our staff adhere to the most rigorous interpretation of this standard.” This sounds good, but I’m curious as to what this rigorous interpretation will be.

Update, August 27, 2016:

The issue reared its head again during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.