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