The liberal dilemma

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 5, 2011 at 11:45 AM - 9 Comments

Stanley Greenberg outlines the trouble for Democrats in the United States.

This distrust of government and politicians is unfolding as a full-blown crisis of legitimacy sidelines Democrats and liberalism. Just a quarter of the country is optimistic about our system of government — the lowest since polls by ABC and others began asking this question in 1974. But a crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism. It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?

…  it has been the conservatives, the Tea Party members and the anti-immigrant groups who understand the anger with government, and rush in to exploit it. Perhaps now, with the debacle in Washington, liberals will become instinctively angry with this illegitimate government and build their politics from there.

Consider, in this vein, the rhetoric Jack Layton used in the last election. A few excerpts from the speech he gave on the last night of the election. Continue…

Bikinis and beer are okay

By Cigdem Iltan - Wednesday, July 27, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

The election of an Islamist government in Tunisia wouldn’t mean bikinis and beer won’t be welcome on its beaches, the leader of a once-outlawed party says. Rached Ghannouchi, who heads the North African country’s most liberal Islamist party, Al Nahda, says women may sunbathe and alcohol can flow freely if his party takes power in the elections scheduled for October. Ghannouchi, 70, supports a democratic interpretation of Islam, as seen in Turkey, and spent more than two decades in exile in London for his views. He returned to Tunisia in January after a popular uprising ended president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali’s 24-year despotic rule.

Al Nahda, which means “the awakening” in Arabic, is expected to emerge from the election with more votes than any other political party. Maintaining the appeal of Tunisia as a tourist destination is front of mind for the party, as the industry has taken a hit amidst an ongoing war in neighbouring Libya. Ghannouchi says his party will discourage drinking, rather than ban the use of alcohol. “Islam is not a closed religion. We want our country to be open to all nations,” he told the London Times. “Our aim will not be to cut supply of alcohol, but to reduce demand.”

Revolution and liberalism just don't mix

By Andrew Potter - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 12 Comments

Kevin Frayer/AP

There’s a great scene at the beginning of Doctor Zhivago when the Bolsheviks are marching through town in peaceful protest, singing songs of freedom and brotherhood while the aristocrats dance and drink in a ballroom that overlooks the street. The party goes uncomfortably quiet as the singing builds in volume, until Mr. Komarovsky, the high-born villain of the story, cracks a joke: “But will they still sing in tune after the revolution?” Everyone laughs, the band starts back up, and the party resumes.

It is increasingly obvious that the outcome of the popular uprisings hopscotching their way across the Middle East will be far messier and uncertain than the fall of Communism two decades ago. While virtually all of the former Soviet Bloc states in Eastern Europe quickly reverted to some form of liberal democracy, none of the countries in the Middle East has any comparable tradition to fall back on. That is why, when it comes to the ongoing turmoil in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, the worry is not that the protesters won’t manage to sing in tune once they’ve got rid of the strongmen, dictators and corrupt monarchs, it is that they will.

Revolutions are almost always about high-minded ideals like freedom, nationhood or the class struggle. But simmering just beneath the ideals is something more powerful and far less noble: the pull of solidarity, with a people joined in common cause, against a common enemy. You don’t have to be an old-school Bolshevik to appreciate the power of solidarity to excite the crowd. To see otherwise sensible people get taken over by tribalism and blood lust, walk down to the front lines of the next G20 protest, or go to Montreal and check out a Canadiens game during the playoffs. As Elias Canetti noted in his classic study Crowds and Power, the fire does a better job of unifying the audience than the play.

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Day 3, epilogue

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 28, 2010 at 5:27 PM - 40 Comments

Here is video of Michael Ignatieff’s closing remarks. The speech itself will neither change the course of human history, nor is it likely to doom him to political failure. That’s my expert analysis.

The politics of IQ

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 5:41 PM - 19 Comments

Grubby as it can be, politics remains at bottom a contest of ideas. One side claims the superiority of its program and values. The other responds in kind, and voters decide which they like best.

Or, in Canada’s case, which they dislike least.

What happens, though, when someone suggests members of one political group are themselves smarter than the folks on the other side?

A recent study out of the London School of Economics did just that, purporting to show among other things that atheistic liberals boast higher IQs, on average, than their religious and conservative counterparts.

Author Satoshi Kanazawa, an “evolutionary psychologist,” then went on to draw some incendiary and fanciful conclusions from his findings: conservatism, he explained, is a very human predisposition based on self-interest—a bred-in-the-bone inclination to care about family and friends rather than the wider world that is genetically unrelated to us. Liberalism, meanwhile, reflects a more evolved willingness to embrace novel ideas and to care about those we don’t see or know, he said; it springs from greater intelligence and awareness, and takes brains to pull off comfortably.

As such, he said, liberals are less likely to need such psychological crutches like God to get through life. “More intelligent children are more likely to grow up to go against their natural evolutionary tendency to believe in God, and they become atheists,” Kanazawa wrote in the study, which was published in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly.

At first glance, the findings looked like a gift to the non-religious left, which in the U.S. at least has a history of claiming intellectual superiority. It is a peculiar form of identity politics, grounded in the notion that brainy sorts are most likely to join a club that would have themselves as members (apologies to Groucho Marx).

Consider the reaction six years ago, when the launch of Air America moved progressive commentators to predict that this liberal answer to right-wing, open-mouth radio would fall flat. Liberals, they theorized, are too smart and open-minded to be Ditto-heads, of course. If that meant sitting still for a daily pasting at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, well, that’s the price you pay for being progressive (they were right: Air America shut for good in January, though its demise probably had more to do with poor management and in-fighting than the IQs of its listeners).

Why then, are liberals running so hard from Kanazawa’s study?

Possibly because the armchair statisticians who lurk the digi-sphere have done such a great job rubbishing both its design and logic. Shockingly, some of these clever people are conservatives, like the Canadian libertarian Neil Reynolds. Others are what Margaret Thatcher might have called squishy, and proud to be so.

These critics are quick to point out that the purported spread between the IQs of progressives and reactionaries is only six points—within the margin of error of many IQ tests. How, they ask, can one draw conclusions about human development over a few millennia based on a sample of 15,000 Americans surveyed in the late 1990s—and adolescent Americans at that?

Liberals may also be troubled by the checkered history of this sort of inquiry. Quite apart from its eugenic overtones, past claims that liberals were brainier than conservatives generally have been proven unfounded or been exposed as hoaxes. Five years ago, the Economist printed a graphic indicating people from U.S. states that voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election were on average dimmer than those from states that went Democrat. Alas, the venerable British magazine was forced to print a correction, admitting it had been sucked in by an internet hoax.

Other studies based on the findings of the U.S. General Social Survey have found virtually no statistical difference between the IQs of people who vote Democrat and those who vote Republican (this blog suggests the “advantage” has been see-sawing back and forth, with the Dems inching ahead by a half-point in ’04).

But most of the suspicion boils down fear over how the theory plays into more deeply cast political identities. That old eastern-intellectual label remains an enduring problem for Democrats in the U.S.—and to a lesser degree large-L Liberals in Canada. The perception isn’t so much that they are smarter than everyone else as that they think they are—and thus feel entitled to tell others how to run their lives.

Small wonder then, that a sworn enemy of the religious right like P.Z. Myers, a University of Minnesota biologist who has waged war against proponents of intelligent design, is warning his blog readers to “stop patting yourselves on the back over this study,” and advising them to “ignore anything with Kanazawa’s name on it.”

Liberals may not be all that much brighter than conservatives, on average. But they’re smart enough, evidently, to know trouble when they see it.

That Krieber manifesto, short version

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 6:59 AM - 95 Comments

1. I believe the Liberal Party of Canada is destined to become a miserable component of ephemeral coalitions, like the liberal parties in Europe, because it refused to submerge its identity in an ephemeral coalition, the way the liberal parties in Europe did.

2. Our party was inherently doomed from the moment Mr. Martin ousted Mr. Chrétien. So my husband’s subsequent leadership really never had a chance. Nonetheless, given a chance, my husband certainly could have saved the party; it would be quite wrong to suggest that it was doomed.

3. Nothing good at all can come of using polls to attack a party leader, but did I happen to mention how badly Mr. Ignatieff is doing in the polls?

4. I dream of a party where the order of the day is happiness, and not assassination. Now excuse me for a few moments while I disassemble, clean, and conceal this fragrantly smoking .50-calibre rifle I’ve just noticed lying at my feet.

'Liberalism is not a bloodless breviary for rootless cosmopolitans'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 8, 2009 at 4:05 PM - 23 Comments

The text of Michael Ignatieff’s speech—for the annual Isaiah Berlin lecture—in London, England this evening.
Continue…

The Liberal Comeback In America

By John Parisella - Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 6:22 PM - 15 Comments

Conventional wisdom in America would have you believe that identifying oneself as liberal is politically risky. After all, when was the last time a serious political contender for the presidency embraced the liberal label? Outside of Teddy Kennedy, Democratic politicians have preferred the term ‘progressive’ to ‘liberal’ for the past three decades. The epic Obama-Clinton battle of last year rarely featured the word ‘liberal.’ President Clinton, a liberal president in a conservative era, preferred the term centrist to identify his brand of politics. He therefore drifted even further from the ‘liberal’ label. Obama seems hesitant to use the word, but when you look at his policies and listen to his rhetoric, you get the distinct impression identifying as a liberal may no longer be a liability for a mainstream politician. In fact, I believe the word ‘liberal’ is on the verge of a resurgence and a comeback. As well it should.

The U.S. political cycle is once again working its magic. After close to three decades of conservative dominance (which was not all bad), Americans seem to be responding to a new brand of liberalism—one in which the government is no longer the problem Ronald Reagan so memorably insisted it was. Government can now offer solutions. The credit for this goes to the financial crisis and the appalling greed of Wall Street for the resurgence. But we should not ignore the role the recent failings of the American conservative movement have played reviving liberalism. Conservatism is in dire need of redefinition, rethinking and purpose. Years of out-of-control deficits, inconclusive and ill-managed wars, mean-spirited and divisive politics, and compassionate conservatives that are neither conservative nor compassionate have harmed the brand.

However, today’s liberals should be careful to avoid getting nostalgic about the FDR years or the 30 years of liberalism that followed. By the end of the sixties, that brand of liberalism had run its course. In fact, liberals then were seen as free-spending, bureaucracy-building elitists with a strong interventionist streak. And eventually, they became associated with a breakdown of law and order, and a widespread sense of permissiveness that led to the rebirth of the conservative movement in the 1970′s. The Vietnam War did not help as it was seen as liberal war.

Liberals today seem to have learned that government must work with market forces and that sensible fiscal policies are fundamental to a sound and effective government. Here, Clinton deserves much credit for modernizing today’s liberalism, as he left the country with balanced budgets and reduced debt. The challenge for the Obama administration will be to harness the traditional liberal values of fairness, justice and opportunity, and mesh them with an approach to government that emphasizes responsibility, that creates the conditions for prosperity, and that acts to redistribute wealth in ways that reduce inequalities within society without punishing success. Obama has already articulated this  ‘progressive’ vision for government. His near-100 days in power reflect this. Now, if he could only start using the word ‘liberal,’ then the comeback will be complete.