‘The reality of mass politics makes parties absolutely necessary’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 14 Comments

Andrew Potter defends the existence of political parties.

Nenshi also pointedly refused to affiliate himself with any particular party. He re-emphasized that line while giving a speech in Toronto last week, saying in the Q&A after the talk that the absence of parties is the one thing he likes best about city politics. Parties, he said, are of interest to academics, to the media, and to politicians themselves, but to the average citizen they are useless.

Like almost all popularly held views, the only problem with this is that it’s wrong, and based on a serious misunderstanding of what parties are for. Most people think that parties are supposed to advance a specific ideology, like left-wing egalitarianism or social conservatism. Some parties do this, but that is mostly just a side-effect of their primary role, which is to translate popular support into political power. They do this by delivering a cohesive and disciplined block of support sufficient to sustain a government for an extended period of time.

See previously: In defence of partisanship

The rebel sell

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 9 Comments

Andrew Potter considers the overarching theme of Samara’s findings.

To begin with, Samara’s findings underscore the profound amateurism that permeates our national politics. When the vast majority of members of Parliament, upon leaving office, feel obliged to insist that well, they never really wanted to be a politician in the first place, that only reinforces the broad cynicism that many people feel toward public life. After all, if our members of Parliament don’t take their jobs all that seriously, why should anyone else?

To amplify that point a bit, it raises the question of who is ultimately responsible for the health of Canada’s democracy. Institutions are not buildings, they are sets of norms and procedures designed to achieve certain goals, and being “institutionalized” simply means that you accept those norms and are committed to keeping them healthy. Parliament’s central function is to enable representative self-government, which in our system involves working within and through institutional structures that are centuries old.

Andrew Potter on this election's impact on business and the economy

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

I believe the polite term is "intellectual escort," or perhaps "fiancé"

By John Geddes - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 12:41 PM - 54 Comments

Regarding the lively debate over Andrew Potter’s post on CBC’s Vote Compass, I’d like to offer a bit of guidance to those who seem to be labouring under the delusion that Potter represents a set of lazy left-liberal biases shared by mainstream-media dimwits and tenured loafers alike.  

Don’t be ridiculous.

His book The Authenticity Hoax is a cogent assault on the kind of limp thinking he sums up as “stagnant and reactionary politics masquerading as something personally meaningful and socially progressive.” He annoys environmentalist doom-sayers and organic-food puritans.

As a result, he’s been lauded in the Wall Street Journal, denounced elsewhere for peddling a “strident defence of free-market consumer capitalism.” So argue with him if you’re so inclined; but trying to pigeonhole him in the way some have attempted in the past couple of days is plain foolish.

Why happiness suddenly matters

By Andrew Potter - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 6 Comments

Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images

Politics is the art of taking credit, and politicians have been known to insert themselves into the receiving line for kudos for everything from Olympic gold medals to sunshine in July. But what they really like to take credit for is economic growth, which is why an election-starved Michael Ignatieff has been going around lately asking Canadians whether they are any better off today than they were four years ago. The recession bit hard, recovery has been slow, and Canadians and their governments find themselves mired in debt.

What Ignatieff should really be asking, though, is whether we’re any better off today than we were 40 years ago. The economist Tyler Cowen recently released a short e-book called The Great Stagnation, in which he points out that between 1947 and 1973, inflation-adjusted median income in the United States more than doubled. But from 1973 to 2004, it rose only 22 per cent, and over the past decade median income has actually declined. He notes that if pre-1973 growth rates had continued for the next three decades, “median family income in the United States would now be more than $90,000, as opposed to its current range of around $50,000.”

So, what happened?

Cowen’s argument is that the West spent most of the 20th century living off the easy proceeds of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to machinery powered by cheap fossil fuels, industry grabbed almost all of the low-hanging fruit available for increasing productivity, and that got widely shared out in the form of steadily growing wages for all workers. But now we’ve reached a technological plateau, and while Cowen thinks things will get better, eventually, it will be a while before we see a true dividend from biotech, or clean and cheap alternative energies. In the meantime, income growth will continue to flatline.

Continue…

Recommended books I couldn't review this year

By John Geddes - Monday, December 20, 2010 at 6:59 PM - 4 Comments

One of the best things about being a writer is getting to meet other writers. They tend to be interesting company. Even better, they sometimes ask their publicists to send free copies of their new books. Of course, it’s not proper to review the books of one’s friends, although I believe this has been known to happen (as has the even more improper practice of reviewing the books of one’s enemies).

I try not to cross that line. Still, I hate to think that even a single last-minute Christmas shopper this week should lack for guidance regarding the perfect gift book merely because of my scruples over the past 12 months in refraining from praising the work of old friends, current colleagues, and valued acquaintances. So, with that disclosure, here are four books published in 2010 that you shouldn’t overlook:

The Authenticity Hoax by Andrew Potter   When this book came out last spring, reaction naturally focused on Potter’s effortlessly entertaining way with a pop-culture reference. For instance, his long list of stuff marketed as authentic—Ethiopian cuisine to Coca-Cola, ecotourism to urban lofts—was widely remarked. But what will stick with readers is the compelling way he reminds us, without ever preaching, about what’s valuable in modernity, liberalism, secularism, and even consumerism.

Every Lost Country by Steven Heighton    The action, and there’s plenty of it, straddles the high-altitude border between Nepal and China. The main plot involves Canadians who get mixed up with Tibetan refugees fleeing Chinese soldiers; a major sub-plot follows a climber trying to conquer a remote Himalayan mountain. On both of these fronts, Heighton builds suspense, and paints unforgiving landscapes, with the same deftness he showed in his celebrated Arctic novel, Afterlands.

Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants by Christina H. Tarnopolsky   By taking on the task of rehabilitating Plato’s concept of shame, Tarnopolsky approaches the intersection of private and public life from an entirely unexpected angle. “Can we have a democratic politics,” she asks, “that preserves the kind of shame that is constitutive of respect and civility while avoiding the shame that stigmatizes and isolates certain groups from the public sphere?” This isn’t light reading by any means, but there’s a bracing urgency that drives her argument.

A Man In Uniform by Kate Taylor    A spate of recent non-fiction books attest to the lasting fascination of the Dreyfus Affair. Taylor turns the saga of anti-Semitism in belle époque Paris into a sort of detective story. It’s uncommonly smart entertainment, lifted as literature by the way Taylor gradually increases the tension in the relationships between her protagonist, the stolid lawyer Francois Dubon, and both his wife and mistress. Domesticity is strained, politics are shaken, and it all evokes the sense an unstable new century about to begin.

Monster hospital

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 23, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 57 Comments

Some thoughts now on Mark Kingwell’s recent essay, not necessarily in response, but at least inspired by. Andrew Potter has posted some of his thoughts here. Both Andrew and Mark are exceptionally smart and have offered valuable perspective and insight. I apologize for the complete lack of references to Aristotle in what follows. Continue…

The problem is bigger than Obama

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, February 3, 2010 at 9:10 AM - 32 Comments

Jay Leno took some time out from his own problems last week to take a shot at Barack Obama. “It’s hard to believe President Obama’s now been in office for a year,” be said. “And you know, it’s incredible. He took something that was in terrible, terrible shape and he brought it back from the brink of disaster: the Republican party.”

In Leno veritas, as they say. Obama’s approval ratings are in the toilet, and his ever-shortening coattails keep sending more and more party loyalists tumbling into the gutter. With Scott Brown’s astonishing theft of the late Teddy Kennedy’s Senate seat, it is starting to look as if the Democrats will be toast come the mid-term elections in November.

Continue…

Broken democracy? Bah humbug!

By Paul Wells - Monday, September 28, 2009 at 7:14 AM - 57 Comments

Colleague Potter demurs.

Generation gap? There really is no such thing.

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 2:41 PM - 7 Comments

A while ago I participated in a seminar on what the private and public sector could do to keep young talent interested and engaged. My job was to listen to the discussion and offer at the end some critical reflections on what I had heard. But after a day spent listening to almost a hundred well-paid and over-indulged twentysomethings complain about how their jobs didn’t allow them to self-actualize in the manner to which they felt entitled, I was ready to strangle the lot of them.

It’s with similar wariness about the youth of today that people like me greet the Beloit College “Mindset List,” an annual summary of the cultural touchstones that shape the world view of each incoming class of undergraduates. And so for the class of 2013 (born in 1991), Freddy Mercury has always been dead, text has always been hyper, and Magic Johnson has always been HIV-positive. Add to all of this “sexting” and cyberbullying and a general lack of concern for privacy, and it is hard not to conclude that kids these days espouse a seriously alien set of values. Continue…

Summer reading

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 7, 2009 at 1:07 PM - 7 Comments

Three important book reviews that arrived on newsstands awhile back, but that I’ve only now just noticed online now.

First, our own Andrew Potter on Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis.

Second, John Baglow, of Dawg’s Blog, on Garth Turner’s Sheeple.

Third, our own Andrew Coyne on The Birthright Lottery.

Also, in that issue, but not yet online, is an interesting review by Marian Botsford Fraser of Sylvia Bashevkin’s Women, Power, Politics.

How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people (II)

By Michael Petrou - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 11:57 PM - 5 Comments

My colleague Andrew Potter blogged a few weeks ago about Thomas Ricks’ new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The book tells the story behind America’s strategic shift in Iraq – from one where the primary goal is defeating the enemy, to the current strategy which holds that the primary objective is winning over the population.

The man most responsible for this shift is David Petraeus, who commanded the 101^st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and later led its occupation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Here he sought to engage and protect the local population, rather than seeking out and destroying every last insurgent. The city was a rare success during the early days of America’s occupation of Iraq, but was swallowed up by the insurgency when Petraeus and the 101^st left. Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command and directs U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, where the United States is shifting its focus, and where Canadian soldiers have been fighting the Taliban for the last seven years.

Last June, Petraeus sent his commanders in Iraq a memo in which he outlines the tactics and philosophies he expects them to employ in a hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency campaign. This memo is included in the appendix of The Gamble, and I’ve recorded much of it below.

General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, shares Petraeus’s belief that beating an insurgency requires winning over the local population. He said as much in a recent speech. Still, I’d like to know how many of the tactics and strategies discussed by Petraeus are employed by Canadians in Afghanistan. Does the Canadian military have patrol bases and outposts in Kandahar city? How much time (especially overnight) do Canadian troops spend there versus back at the main base? Are Canadian soldiers living among the Afghans, or as, Petraeus would describe it, are they commuting to work? How many patrols are conducted on foot, versus from inside vehicles? How much, if any, of Kandahar city and province do the Canadian soldiers or their Afghan allies decisively control? Are they holding territory, or does their authority vanish when their patrol rolls away? Is the Canadian military working to peel away “reconcilable” insurgents from “irreconcilables”? In other words, are Canadian soldiers talking to the Taliban? How smooth are transitions from an outgoing group of soldiers to those who are just arriving? Are relationships that are built between locals and one deployment of Canadian troops carried over to the new arrivals?

Continue…

Sometimes a primate is just a primate, Reverend

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, March 5, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 6 Comments

The third week of Black History Month was not exactly a high-water mark in race relations in the United States. Last Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder (who is black) caused a storm of anger when in a speech he called America a “nation of cowards” for refusing to have a frank conversation about race.

The same day, the New York Post ran a political cartoon showing two policemen standing in front of the bullet-riddled body of a chimpanzee. One of the cops is shown holding a smoking gun, while the other looks at him and says, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.” The Post’s offices were promptly picketed by a few hundred demonstrators who denounced the paper as racist, led in a chant of “end racism now” by civil rights activist and professional race-baiter Al Sharpton.

Continue…

Forget big tent: unite the left is more like big top

By Andrew Potter - Monday, November 24, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 7 Comments

Liberals tend to lose their minds when they are out of power for more than one election cycle, and one of the more enjoyable consequences of Stephen Harper’s second minority government is seeing otherwise cagey political operators give serious consideration to some seriously bad ideas.

The latest rotten egg is the notion that Canada’s political “left”—that is, the Liberals, the NDP, and the Greens—need to unite into a single party. The cost of not doing so, apparently, will be a more or less permanent camp-out in the political wilderness as the Conservatives are handed as many electoral victories as elections they care to engineer.

This idea was first seriously floated almost two years ago when the former NDP strategist Jamey Heath released his book Dead Centre, which argued that the NDP needed to move toward the centre, feast on the carcass of the Liberals, and—as his book’s blurb put it—“charge forward with a progressive agenda.” Continue…

Just when you thought the world was safe from post-cabinet shuffle ruminations …

By kadyomalley - Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 11:28 PM - 66 Comments

… the BlackBerry Roundtable reunites to survey the damage.

BlackBerry Roundtable: By the clicking of our thumbs …

By kadyomalley - Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 8:44 AM - 70 Comments

… yet another election postmortem this way comes.

Save the last PIN for us: The Final BlackBerry(tm) Roundtable

By kadyomalley - Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

… enjoy!

The Blackberry Roundtable: "He told me he deleted those pictures from his hard drive after we broke up!"

By kadyomalley - Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 9:32 AM - 40 Comments

Courtesy of the one and only Andrew Potter, check out our latest back-and-forthing here. Oh, and somehow, a mischievous gremlin in the printing press incorrectly attributed a paragraph of my musings to poor Scott Reid. For the record, this is all me:

That’s true, but not every foot soldier slogging through the mud on the electoral battlefield may have expected to be there, and unless you’re willing to live your entire life as though you might, at any point, be on the national — or even the local — stage, fielding pointed questions from the media — I’m not sure if there’s any way to anticipate every potentially embarrassing eventuality. What you should do, however, is make sure that your campaign knows about that experimental art video you made with your now-estranged ex-boyfriend before they find out about it through a press release from the opposing team.

Enjoy!

Maybe John Estacio will write the Right Side Up opera

By Paul Wells - Sunday, August 17, 2008 at 10:10 PM - 0 Comments

This is actually really, really good. Potter explains what the hell it is.

UPDATE: Listening to the Rebel Cell player at Baba’s website. It’s ridiculously good. Go go go!