I was watching some clips of ‘The Daily Show’ today, about Glenn Beck and his plan to hold a rally on the anniversary of, and at the site of, Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. For those of you not paying attention to American politics, this is causing a tiny bit of controversy, on account of how Beck is an unapologetic racist who is espousing philosophies that would make the non-violent King want to punch him in the crotch until his balls implode.

But here’s the thing: Beck and his supporters insist that he’s not racist at all, apologetically or otherwise. They might even pop up in this very comments section to do so. They insist that they’re all good, kind-hearted people who are just espousing principles of common decency and humanity, and the Evil Lib’ruls are trying to shut them up by making baseless, unfounded claims of racism that just happen to be supported by easily misunderstood video evidence.

They’re lying, of course. We know they’re lying, because we have the aforementioned video evidence. They know they’re lying, because there’s not a single person in the world who could be so utterly lacking in self-awareness and basic intelligence as to hold a giant rally for white conservatives on the anniversary of a famous civil rights speech, in the exact same place that speech was held, and not notice that there might be some sort of problem. Beck is being totally disingenuous and everybody knows it including himself, but Beck, like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Malkin, and Ann Coulter, simply refuse to admit that they’re being disingenuous. They have decided that as long as they’re consistent in their denials, the truth of what they’re denying simply doesn’t matter.

And that sounded familiar to me, as I was thinking about how to describe the phenomenon for this column, and I finally remembered this post from the excellent blog, Kung Fu Monkey. (Please read it, I spent a long time looking through the archives for it. Then I got smart and just googled the keywords. But I digress…) What he describes there is the problem of shamelessness, and he describes it perfectly. Glenn Beck has no sense of shame. He doesn’t see any problem with lying, and confronting him on his lies is no use, because he will simply continue to lie. You cannot shame the man into admitting that he’s a terrible person, because he’s such a terrible person that he doesn’t care that he’s lying about being terrible. And he’s got a national TV show.

Now obviously, this isn’t going to last forever. Most of Beck’s sponsors do have a sense of shame, or at least can put a dollar amount on exactly how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to support a shameless man, and they’re dropping his show in droves. And the remaining ones are being indicted for fraud, because while there are no laws about shamelessly lying on a national television program, there are laws about false advertising, and coincidentally most of the people still selling ad space on Beck’s show are turning out to be fraudsters. But when Beck goes away, someone else will take his place, because these guys have figured out the loophole in the system. Just deny it all. Even if you know you’re lying, even if they know you’re lying, deny it all. You’re not breaking any laws. The only way they can punish you is with social contempt, and you’re already beneath that.

John Rogers hit it perfectly. These guys have found the exploit that allows them to game the system of civilized conduct. That’s why irony is dead: Stephen Colbert and his fellow comedians are trying to make an absurd statement in a serious way, but all they can ever hope to do is match the stuff Glenn Beck is trying to say for real. You can’t even make fun of these guys, because they’re crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams. All you can really do is hope that people get smart enough to see through their bullshit, and that’s a pipe dream.

Someone broke human behavior. We need a patch.

So far too many people have asked me to do a post about the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and using that phrase just makes me feel irritated because it’s not at ground zero and it’s not a mosque, but using the phrase at least means everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Here’s my problem: I don’t know what there is left to write about. The right people have already pretty much covered every inch of this issue and why it’s a non-troversy. People have talked about how the “mosque” is in fact a community centre with a prayer room, and how if you want to call it a mosque then by the same logic the Pentagon is a mosque. People have talked about how Feisal Abdul Rauf really isn’t anything but a moderate, peaceful scholar and how his “ties” to radical Islamic movements have been overdramatized or fictionalized. People have talked about how this wasn’t a big deal to anybody until the usual right-wing media suspects decided to gin it up into a big deal months after the fact. People have talked about how other people who should frankly know better (I’m looking at you, Howard Dean) are acting as apologists for bigots. And of course, people have talked about how this is a basic issue of civil rights, and how suggesting that all Muslims have to be “sensitive” post-9/11 is the worst kind of assigning of collective guilt, something that should generally be anathema to anybody living in a modern liberal democracy.

And none of it really matters, because “Muslim” is the new “nigger.” Except in a way it’s kind of worse, because the (almost entirely white) people screaming about Muslims nowadays are the ones who either still use the word or who are the ones who never really understood why it was bad in the first place. Everybody knows at least one white person who doesn’t understand why black people get to use the N-word and why white people can’t; to them, the word being bad is completely understandable. Taboo behaviour is nothing new, after all, and they can understand a new type of taboo behaviour, but what they don’t understand is that the reason for the taboo isn’t because the word itself is bad; after all, it’s just a word. “Nigger” is taboo because when someone who isn’t black uses it, it’s one-word shorthand for “you are less human than me based on the colour of your skin.” Which is why black people can use it, because when one black person says it to another, they’re both black and that shorthand doesn’t apply.

If you don’t understand that – or if you don’t care – then you’re not really going to be concerned about the fact that there are many different types of Muslims and the gigantic majority of them just want to live in peace like everybody else, because the idea of living post-racially (as best anybody can; we all have our inherent biases to overcome) is one that requires introspection and an inquisitive mind. Neither of these traits has been terribly evident in the mosque protesters.

Two things happened to me recently that dovetailed in an odd way: first, I broke my arm in a bicycle accident; second, I picked up volumes 1-6 of Marvel’s Essential X-Men books for a very reasonable price. The upshot of the first event was that I had to have a metal plate and screws attached to hold the broken bone together, with the result that when I travel by air (as I do fairly often for my job) I now have to budget an extra half-hour or so at the airport to explain that, yes, it’s the metal plate in my arm that’s setting off the metal detector. Because I am a smartass, it immediately occurred to me that if I were a suicide bomber what I really ought to do is get a sympathetic doctor to implant a bomb in my arm in such a way that it looked like an orthopedic plate; then I could have a good laugh with the security people, get on the plane and blow it up at my leisure. (I had a similar thought back when they were hunting Saddam Hussein and there was a story about a guy in southern Iraq who was always being mistaken for him; what Hussein should have done, I thought, was pretend to be that guy — “Yeah, I get that all the time.”)

Which brings us to the X-Men, because I hadn’t realized until I read from Giant-Size X-Men #1 to around issue 200 all in a row just how much the whole “persecuted mutants” business was Claremont’s idea. (And by the way, how hard is it to imagine that back in the day the Defenders got four Giant-Size specials, while the X-Men only got one?) Sure, the original run had the Sentinels, but their creator was portrayed as a basically crazy guy, not a garden-variety bigot; more to the point, there was little sense in the original comics that the average man on the street was anti-mutant. Nor is that the case in the early issues of Claremont’s run: in their very first adventure they’re called to defend Cheyenne Mountain in place of the Avengers (the general in charge remarks that he doesn’t trust them, but he still lets them go to it) and a few issues later a fairly big deal is made out of just how high Professor X’s security clearance is, the upshot of both being that the X-Men are still very much a part of the establishment. (When Cyclops identifies himself to the general his dialogue could just as easily come from Captain America.) For some time after that the X-Men have pretty generic superhero adventures, encountering demons, aliens and leprechauns (don’t ask; for the love of God, don’t ask) until the storyline that forms the basis of the whole rest of Claremont’s run, the justly famous “Days of Future Past.” (As an aside, Claremont clearly just loved to sound profound by putting antonyms together; for a less successful example, see “Lifedeath.”) Though what most people remember from that story is the scenes of various X-Men being killed, the element that matters most thematically is the introduction of the Mutant Registration Act, which was originally going to be introduced in memory of Senator Kelly, a politician the X-Men failed to save from assassination, but which Kelly was able to introduce himself when they saved him thanks to some handy-dandy time travel. From then on anti-mutant sentiment becomes a predominant motif in the book, with both harmless Professor X and cute-as-a-button Kitty Pryde being “mutant-bashed” and practically every non-mutant character uttering some sort of anti-mutant slur. The Mutant Registration Act stands a symbol of that attitude, with support for it standing as a handy identifier for bigots.

Which brings us back to airport security. Because if you think about it for a moment it becomes clear that something like the Mutant Registration Act would be absolutely necessary. Imagine standing in line at the airport and knowing that some of the people around you might be able to project energy beams, or bend metal, or mind-control the pilot; that they might not be fully able to control their powers; and that these people had a documented history of fighting other people like them in public places. Would you feel confident about getting on a plane? (I’ll bet the airlines were Senator Kelly’s biggest contributors.)

The X-Men series is often described as being a metaphor for the oppression of minorities, but when looked at it this way it becomes clear that the metaphor doesn’t stand up: if superhuman mutants really existed society would have a legitimate reason to fear or at least be wary of them, something that has never been true of any oppressed minority.

But if the metaphor that’s supposed to be at the heart of the series doesn’t work, why has the comic been so successful? Because the X-Men don’t represent oppressed minorities, they represent oppressed teenagers. (This may also explain why comic books about characters who are actually part of oppressed minorities generally fail to sell.) Nobody feels more persecuted than teenagers, especially the nerdy, white, middle-class teenagers who have traditionally been the main audience for comics. In the hyper-dramatic world of the teenager, breaking up with your girlfriend (or, more likely, being turned down for a date) has the same emotional impact as your fiancee being disintegrated on the Moon, and being hunted by giant robots is exactly equivalent to being told to buy something or get out.

Chris Hayward wrote a lengthy post on the G20 protests and, in his opinion, why they work and are necessary. It’s well worth reading, even if there are important parts of it where I think he’s completely wrong. (His extensive summary of police abuses is not one of those parts.) Go read it and come back; I’ll be sitting here eating salt and vinegar Crispers.

…okay. (I didn’t need to eat them anyway. They are fattening.) So, here we go:

“Does protesting really accomplish anything?”…

I think it does. One of the best – and most current – examples I can offer to back up my conviction are the accomplishments of the Gay liberation movement, in its broadest sense.

He goes on to offer a pretty good argument of how protesting – and specifically Pride marching – helped energize and legitimize the gay rights movement. And he’s totally correct about how protesting helped the gay rights movement. But as I’ve argued before, the difference between the gay rights movement (or the black rights movement, or the feminist movement, or really any civil rights movement in general) and G20 protesting is dead simple: every one of those movements have had fairly clear, easy to explain goals that were widely agreed upon by those involved. You can sum up most of them in a single sentence: “we just want to be treated the same as white men, and have the same rights and privileges afforded to white men.”

Hayward, later in his essay, starts writing about what reasons exist to protest the G20. Here is a summary:

- the misbehaviour and/or rapacious policies of the IMF
- the effects of 20th-century neocolonialism
- the responsibility of much of the political/financial elites for the financial meltdown and their ensuing lack of punishment/responsibility
- the move towards budget austerity
- failure to agree upon an international banking transaction tax
- job losses
- indigenous sovereignty
- human rights abuses
- abuse of police authority
- environmental damages of the tar sands
- etc.

All of this combined is not a protest message. This is a political philosophy, and it’s not a particularly simple one either.¹ That it’s not simple frankly isn’t much of a plus from a communication standpoint. Hayward’s summary of the issues involved is about as concise as you can manage and it would still be multiple pages, and frankly Hayward is a lot better at making his point than ninety-nine point nine nine nine a lot more nines percent of protesters because his summation of issues is coherent while being able to deal with complexity.

Multiple pages in a book is too much for a protest. Again, harkening back to the aforementioned civil rights movements: I would suggest that the reason they were successful, more than anything else, was their simplicity. The message was easily communicated, which is key because protests generate a lot of attention but only for a very brief time. Protests are by their very nature not good at nuance, and the G20 protesters’ message is, when it’s coherent, extremely nuanced. Hayward himself admits that the protests are “unfocused,” but he seems to think this is to the good:

The world economy is affecting people in diverse ways. And our response to that is diverse. A meeting of the people who are steering the global economy is an opportunity to say “These are all the ways that you are hurting people. Cut it out.”

Look, it’s wonderful and affirming and all that the movement celebrates diversity, but there’s a difference between upholding the principles of IDIC² and effective communication. Why does the left so desperately need to avoid the principles of advertising that have been demonstrated to work, time and again? (Moral rectitude is not a worthwhile response to that question; I don’t care if you think Company X’s ads are soul-destroying, because the techniques they use to communicate their position work and they can work for the left just as easily as they work for the corporate First World.)

Look, let’s take one issue from that list above. I’m going to pick the banking transaction tax, because it was both an issue under consideration at the Toronto G20 and also an unambiguously simple and good idea. Now let’s pretend that, rather than the usual disorganized chaotic mess that we saw, they (somehow) managed to get everybody on one page, chanting “TAX THE BANKS! TAX THE BANKS!” over and over again. It’s simple. It demonstrates popular support on one side of an important issue, which would have given those leaders who were pushing for the international transaction tax – and bear in mind that included the USA, France and Japan, which is why before the summit most observers figured the transaction tax had a 50/50 chance of passing – additional ammunition. Would that have been enough to get the G20 to agree to the tax? Maybe, maybe not. Would it have given the tax a better chance of success? I think that’s unarguable.

Anyway, I know I’m jumping all over Hayward’s article like a rabbit on crack, but I need to leave alone that hobbyhorse and switch to a different one: elsewhere, Hayward is writing about violent protest.

I believe that the advocates of property destruction are responding to a sense that the peaceful forms of protest are simply not working. And I have to say, having attended a hundred or so demonstrations myself, I agree. It certainly feels to me like governments are quite happy to ignore the demands of demonstrations, knowing that, in general, people will get together for a few hours, make some speeches, chant, follow an escorted and permitted route, and then go home. It’s routine and ritualized. It appears to me that protest of any kind works when it is an implicit threat to misbehave; not just a moral appeal that says “please do the right thing,” but an appeal that says “listen to us, or we will stop co-operating.”

Now, I don’t disagree with any of this paragraph, actually. It’s all correct: peaceful protest isn’t working (although I don’t entirely agree with Hayward as to the reasons why, I suspect), and part of the reasons protest can work is because of that threat of disobedience.

The problem I have here is that Hayward seems to think that the protesters are capable of making that threat. They aren’t. This is one of the reasons a lot of the public is willing to simply dismiss protesters as cranks (at best) or criminals (at worst): there simply isn’t any threatening capacity. If 20,000 people had been involved in the riots, then possibly there would have been a scenario comparable to the race riots of 1967-68 or the DNC riot in Chicago in 1968. But, as many people on all sides of the political equation pointed out, only about one or two thousand rioters actually stuck around once the goon squad started smashing things, and most of those one or two thousand weren’t willing to do anything more than stand around and chant slogans. This is not threatening. This is not even close to threatening. The reason protesters can be so easily vilified as criminals is because, when you’ve got a couple hundred people smashing things for no real reason, most people can very easily make the mental jump to “criminals.”

And while I agree that protests can be routine, there simply isn’t any justifiable reason for the sort of violence that happened at the G20. Yes, I get that things like Starbucks and RBC and the like were targeted, but so what? Damaging their property accomplishes literally nothing. “Yeah, you totally dealt out some pain on that imaginary corporate entity!” If a protester smashes RBC’s window, that’s not going to affect RBC’s bottom line; it’s not even going to going to hurt their public image. All you’re doing when you smash up a Starbucks is causing economic pain to a franchise owner: somebody who’s usually the definition of “small businessman.” How does that help your cause? Answer: it doesn’t.

The unfortunate truth is that any significant protest movement is going to need an economic component to it, akin to the black “strikes” on busses and white-owned businesses in the Sixties, or the mid-70s clustering of gay neighborhoods around gay-owned businesses which in turn gave them economic self-sufficiency and an instant business lobby in local government (which, while unglamourous, drives social change faster than just about anything). The G20 protest movement doesn’t have this, and honestly I’m not sure that in this era it’s even possible for them to have one, although I’d love to be proven wrong.

Oh, and one more thing:

(I was way more scared when the [Toronto Blue] Jays [baseball team] won the World Series and people were throwing bottles out of their apartment windows, than I have ever been in a political riot).

Dude. I was at both World Series street celebrations, right at Yonge and Dundas, and if you’re going to suggest that sports riots cause more damage than political ones (an argument that actually has some heft to it), don’t ruin your point by telling us how scared you were of what were easily the most peaceful and civic-minded sports victory celebrations in sporting history. The Toronto celebrations were so non-violent that for literally years afterward they were pointed to as aberrations against a growingly dangerous norm.

1. Libertarianism, for example, is simple, which is one of the reasons it’s so frequently attractive to people. It’s often wrong about many things, of course, but it’s effective at spreading itself. [↩]
2. NEEEEEEEERRRRRD [↩]

I was at the bar with friends last week and discussion turned to the G20, mostly because I hadn’t seen most of them in a while and I wanted to tell them all my good G20 stories (IE, “the ones I won’t publish online because they were off the record”), and subsequently it turned into a discussion about protests. First of course there was the criticism of the protest movement that mostly echoed last Wednesday’s post, but then it turned to something that I think was more interesting, which is: is protest, as we currently understand it, outdated? The arguments in favour of that hypothesis seem fairly strong.

Let’s start off with a simple definition and say that protest movements exist to do two things: change the minds of the public on an issue, and empower individuals to work together to force elite decisionmaking in favour of the “protest” side of the issue. (Okay, also they exist for social reasons and there will always be those who are just there for an adrenalin rush. Let us assume that the primary reason for protests is social change.)

The problem is that your standard protest model is, nowadays, bad at doing both of these things. Even in those situations where protests don’t dissolve into a cacophony of various messages of dissent only tenuously connected to one another, the standard protest model suffers from a problematic catch-22: in order to significantly impact the news cycle, a protest must be really big, but the larger a protest becomes, the more likely it is to be ineffective due to lessened public support due to the inconvenience of the protest and the perception that it’s a one-off stunt. And even when a protest significantly impacts the news cycle, it’s still a one-off event in a modern culture which has trouble remembering what happened in the news three months ago.

“Aha,” you say, “but what about the Tea Party? What about European labour protests?” And these are interesting discussions. The Tea Party isn’t really a good counterexample. Although they have had a number of protests and have had some impact on public debate in the United States, they also aren’t following the traditional protest model, which is “have a really big protest and then that’s it for a while in terms of public visibility.” Granted, liberal protesters might argue that they don’t get any public visibility outside of protests due to media complacency, and they have a point there. But that right there is why the Tea Party has had more impact on the media: they’re essentially sponsored by a cable news network, which has allowed them to outlive the news cycle and become a constant presence.¹ Since most protests will not get that advantage, pointing to the Tea Party as a measure of protest success is erroneous. On top of that, for all the visibility the Tea Party has enjoyed, they haven’t really had that much success at shifting public opinion; there has been no groundswell of support for their pet issues and the movement has remained mostly confined to conservative Republicans despite halfhearted attempts to reach out to libertarians. Really, the Tea Party is more reflective of the current state of the Republican party base than anything else.

As for European labour protests, sure, they work – but they work because when European labour movements go out and protest, that’s not a protest fringe doing it; that’s a hefty chunk of the country. People talk about how the G20 protest was big, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the antiwar protests conducted five or six years ago – and those in turn are equivalent to a smaller European labour protest, except that the American antiwar protests were mostly one-day or very occasionally two-day affairs, whereas European labour protests can go for weeks if need be (and have). European labour protests aren’t analagous to the modern North American protest movement expressly because they aren’t interested in shifting public opinion², but rather in representing a large portion of the public. This makes the “swaying public opinion” part of the protest model null; all these protests are designed to do is sway elite decisions.

So, if traditional protest is no longer good for swaying both the public and the elites, what can do it? This is where I come up empty; none of the existing options seem to work. In the US, phone-in campaigns to Congressional offices have had some success at pushing representatives on important votes, but quite apart from the fact that phone campaigns don’t sway public opinion at all? Even if we accept that the phone system is a solid answer – and I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as some claim – simple numbers seem to make it essentially non-duplicable outside of the United States. There are about 700,000 Americans for every representative in Congress. Most other nations have a much lower citizens-to-representative ratio, generally ranging from 100000:1 (the United Kingdom) to 150000:1 (Australia). If you want to flood their phonebanks, phone campaigns need a participation rate essentially six times as high as happens in the United States. This seems unlikely.

Facebook/Twitter/other internet petitions and polls are flawed from a different end. Phone calls and letter-writing are the traditional weapons of choice for people attempting to make their voices heard to their representatives, but both of these methods require a person to really, really care about an issue.³ This is why politicians have traditionally multiple-counted people doing these things: the assumption is that since one person was angry enough about the issue to contact their representative, therefore there are X more people who feel the same way and will be less inclined to vote for the representative (at a minimum). But internet petitions have almost no disincentives attached to them: there’s a degree of anonymity involved⁴ and there’s next to no effort required, which means that representatives/politicians not only don’t multiple-count the people involved, they sometimes even discount them (in the “this person will never change their vote based on issue X” sense). Even when they don’t discount, the numbers taken at face value are almost never big enough to influence decisionmakers. Fair Copyright For Canada’s 87,543 members means an average of 284 members per riding, which isn’t enough to swing anything other than the absolute swingiest of swing ridings.

So what’s the solution? I’m not sure, to be honest. A combination of social media petitioning to raise public awareness of the issue above and beyond current standards combined with phone-ins coordinated to a degree as yet unexperienced seems like it could work, but it also seems like it would be extremely difficult. Something entirely new, of course, always has potential, but the problem with something entirely new is that I don’t know what that is. Better minds than mine, etc.

1. The more you talk about a thing being a thing, the more likely it is that that thing will become a thing. [↩]
2. I know anarchist commenters here have said they’re not interested in doing that either, but let’s just assume that the majority of left-wing protesters aren’t idiots. [↩]
3. Calling is easy, but has an invasive edge to it that most people instinctively avoid; letter-writing is time-consuming and costs you a stamp. [↩]
4. Or, at the very least, the perceived semi-anonymity people assume exists on the internet and almost never does. [↩]

During my mayoral liveblog last night, I got an email from someone who, because I was mocking candidates for being so overwhelmingly pro-police after a series of truly ridiculous abuses of power during the G20, asked if I thought that this was out of institutional fear of the protesters; that the protesters represent a threat to the established power structure and etc.

The answer, of course, is “no.” The protesters aren’t any threat to the established power structure, not as they currently exist.

Now, many a protester will tell you (and has told me) that the reason most people don’t take them seriously is because the mainstream media¹² has obscured their message and chosen to portray them as a bunch of silly, flighty, violent thugs. As I’ve said before, though, the problem with this theory is that the protesters’ message comes pre-obscured to the general public. Since a mass protest – and just about every G-whatever protest – frequently has no specific central organizing issue, this means that every protester brings their own issues along with them. Since protesters are generally an accomodating lot, there’s genial support for all issues being protested so long as they’re reasonably somewhere on the left of the political spectrum. But this also means that the issues, as they are, are lost. All that is communicated is that the protesters are angry (or, if you prefer, passionate).

Which means that the average viewer of a protest takes away the following:

- the protesters are angry (or passionate)
- they are shouting
- they are marching
- sometimes some of them break things and/or fight with police
- and usually some of them get arrested

You don’t need a compliant media to decide that this movement is composed of silly, violent thugs if that’s the information you’ve got to work with.

On top of that, though, is that when protests turn violent, what I don’t think many protesters understand is that this is always a losing situation for them. Yes, it’s always only a few idiots; that’s a given. But one thing that remains relatively constant (not universal, but relatively constant) is that their fellows are reluctant (or worse, unwilling) to condemn them. Understandable, of course – even if the cries of “solidarity” weren’t genuine (and they mostly are), simple commonality of focus and the shared experience of being targeted by police would do the job.

But here’s the problem: when protesters are reluctant or unwilling to condemn violence – and honestly, it happens more often than not – what they’re doing is setting themselves up in a state of moral equality with the state using force against them. Saying “but the cops have guns and shields and riot armor” isn’t a justification for violence³; if anything it’s a confirmation that the speaker’s issue isn’t that use of violent force is bad, but that the cops can do it more easily than they can.⁴

Finally, it’s worth noting that the movement itself is likely counterproductive. Kevin Drum recently posted about how Tea Partiers and Republicans catering to Tea Partiers were driving independent voters away from the Republican party and making Democrats more willing to vote and organize. Looking at polling on the issue of police reaction, Canadians by and large sympathized with the police over the protesters despite the fact that police overreach was both massive and pretty well documented. I don’t think there can be any question that this is antagonistic public reaction to the protests themselves, and if you look at previous polls concerning protesting in Canada the trend holds up⁵, and largely isn’t about anger at their use of violence so much as it is dislike of the general protest movement.⁶

Can all of these issues be overcome, and thus make the protest movement more effective at shifting public opinion? I think it’s possible, but here’s the thing: everything that would make it possible – IE, would serve to fix the abovementioned issues – would likely require greater central authority and coordination among the protesters, and the protest movement is by its very nature decentralized (and not really keen on the idea of greater central authority anyway). Which is why I don’t think the protest movement isn’t going to see its objectives come to fruition any time soon.

1. Or politicians, or whatever permutation of The Man you prefer. [↩]
2. True story: at one point during the G20 protests, a protest organizer refused to speak with us because we were wearing our media accreditation badges and explained that he was sympathetic only to the media accredited for the Alternative Media Centre. So we showed him our Alternative Media Centre accreditation, which we had gotten first, and he immediately became receptive. When he asked us why we weren’t using that centre, we explained that it was shit and absolutely everybody in it was trying to get proper accreditation. [↩]
3. Trust me when I say that at the G20 in Toronto I heard this so often I constructed a Bingo card in my head of Stuff The Cops Have and played it anew with every conversation. [↩]
4. At this point an anarchist may wish to say something, so let me pre-empt them by saying that communal anarchism is at best a meaningless philosophy when applied to a group larger than a couple of hundred people, and even then its failure rate is tremendous. Please go get a realistic philosophy of government and get back to me. Thank you for your time. [↩]
5. A key point would be the polling over time surrounding the prorogation of Parliament earlier this year. As the protests happened, outrage against the Tories noticeably dropped. [↩]
6. I think the general public understands that the vast majority of protesters do not use violent tactics. I also think the general public believes that the vast majority of protesters don’t or can’t keep the violent assholes from attending protests, even when they know what’s going to happen. [↩]

For those just wanting to read my G20 stuff for Torontoist rather than go through the site looking for it, here you go.

…as I am Torontoist’s official accredited journalist (well, one of two, but I do the writing bits) covering the G20 summit here in Toronto (motto: “When We Have An Economic Summit, We Have Earthquakes And Tornadoes Just To Make The Fucking Point”). Needless to say, this is totally awesome and I hope I get the opportunity to do Jello shots with Paul Krugman, but it also means I am basically not here for the next four days.

So head over to Torontoist and follow along with all the world summit skinny and, presumably, the eventual massive riots.

So the swirling rumour in Canadian politics of the day is that the Liberals and the New Democrats will unify to create a new, centre-left party.

Now, on the one hand, this sounds reasonable, because this is basically what the right-wing parties in Canada did years ago. On the other hand, the basic argument for this idea is that the Liberals are incapable of finding a leader with charisma, and at least Jack Layton looks vaguely human. (Note that the link points out that a “Liberal Democrat” party led by Layton would be victorious, and one led by Michael “useless limpdick” Ignatieff would lose. That Michael Ignatieff would lose an election in a country where generally only forty percent of the country at best is inclined to vote Tory tells you a lot about how useless a limpdick he in fact is.)

Of course, the problem is that in getting the strengths of both parties, you also get their weaknesses: this means you combine the funding collapse of the Liberals with the not-ready-for-prime-time economic strategies of much of the NDP (and, speaking as someone who has spent time in the NDP previously and is pretty reliably left in his politics, some of the lack of understanding of basic economic principles of many Dippers is just incredibly irritating to me). The potential voter has both the leeriness of voting soulless Liberal (and the Liberals will be soulless for as long as it takes them to start defending their record of leadership; why nobody in the party bothers to point out that Paul Martin’s government is largely responsible for Canada mostly avoiding the global financial meltdown is beyond me) and unready NDP. That combination is potentially toxic.

Of course, what’s more important is whether or not a reformed Liberal party would have any chance of picking up additional seats. Would they get a majority? Probably not. Looking at 2008 election results, if you go with a formula of “Liberal Democrats” getting a combined vote of the NDP and Liberals in any given riding and then subtracting ten percent (assuming the most pessimistic scenario with swing voters going Tory and disaffecteds voting Green), they pick up about another twelve to fifteen ridings, which still doesn’t win them an election. However, the upside is that the ridings they’ve already won become extremely solid, which means they can campaign harder in swing ridings and have more effect; they can also more reliably portray themselves as a national party, as they would become competitive in quite a few ridings in BC and Manitoba where they currently aren’t.

Is it a good idea? With the right leader, potentially. Unfortunately, they don’t really have the right leader. When Jack Layton is your best-case scenario, you have issues.

Darren Kramble writes to ask:

As a Canadian ex-pat, I know that the Tories currently have a minority government, but I have no idea how that is going. Anyway, I live in the UK, and the country seems to be freaking out at our hung parliament, as if it is the end of the political world. I’m fairly happy with it, as Labour is now out, as they inevitably would be, but the Tories don’t have a majority that would allow the more batshit crazy things they might want to try. So, any advice to the UK? How is having a minority government working?

Short version: not very well.

Longer version: In the past, Canada’s had very productive minority governments. Lester B. Pearson, for example, gave us major policy changes with a minority government, which included universal healthcare, armed forces unification, and our new flag. There’s nothing in a minority government that inherently says that they have to be unproductive or bad.

However, our recent minority governments, while certainly not outright disastrous, is less than satisfactory. There’s a few reasons for this, some of which are specific to Canada and some of which I’m pretty sure are universal.

What’s specific to Canada is that here, our parties have become regionalized to a certain extent – the Liberals in the eastern half and more urban areas of the country, the Tories in the western half and more rural areas, the NDP competing mostly with the Liberals for space. There’s less incentive to cooperate because excacerbating cross-party and therefore regional tension is, frankly, better for your electoral prospects. (In a UK context, this seems like it could potentially be an issue, given that Labour and the Tories have their regional strongholds to an extent.)

What’s not specific to Canada is this: in a minority government, somebody has to take power. This seems like it’s not an issue, but it is because the minority government, Parliamentary power or not, is in charge and therefore can determine when an election takes place, either by calling one or by putting forth a bill which gets defeated.

This seems like a precarious position, but in practice it isn’t, because in Canada the Tories have figured out something which is obvious on its face but which has no real applicable context beyond a minority government position, which is this: the electorate mostly doesn’t like elections. Which isn’t surprising, because elections tend to be vast resevoirs of bullshit expunged forth combined with general nastiness and pettiness, made even less pleasant thanks to the omnipresence of mass media. (This is my general theory as to why electoral participation has steadily trended downward in most democracies over time.)

So if voters don’t like elections, what do they want? As few elections as possible. But what do minority governments generally guarantee? An election sooner rather than later. So whenever the minority threatens to bring down the government over an issue, you get the endless caterwauling about “endless elections” from both the citizenry and the media willing to complain about it (and they are more than willing, believe me). Which in turn means that the minority is generally blamed for the extra elections which come with minority governments, even when that doesn’t actually make sense given the track record. (Note that the 2006 and 2008 federal elections were both called by the party in power trying to seize electoral advantage; the former failed for the Liberals, the latter succeeded for the Conservatives.)

So there’s essentially a built-in political downside to forcing an election if you’re in the minority. What happens? Well, in Canada we mostly have feckless dipshits for political leaders (really – David Cameron looks good in comparison), so their natural political cowardice combines with the disincentive to call a federal election and thus you have a minority government more or less governing as a majority government, which just pisses off and disenfranchises everybody who didn’t vote for them. (Which, in Canada, right now means more than 60 percent of the country.) This just perpetuates the vicious cycle: voters are disillusioned by their lack of control over political process, so they don’t vote, which results in them having even less control, and so on and so forth.

In short: first-past-the-post systems are terrible for minority governments. A proportional system like Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems want is much better for producing responsive minority governments because they basically require cross-party cooperation to work in the first place; that’s what you want.

Julius Caesar once said, “Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt.” Of course, nobody understood him, because he was speaking some crazy moon-man language instead of English, but it turns out that the saying translates out to, “Men willingly believe what they wish.” Or, to paraphrase, “People believe lies easier if it’s what they already believe.” This is why Julius Caesar made such a good politician, excepting the bit about convincing people not to stab him to death with knives.

But the point still stands, and has in fact stood throughout all of human history. There are certain lies that will always work in politics, no matter how often they’re used, no matter how often they’re debunked, and frequently, even if both the speaker and the listener know they’re lies. Because they’re seductive. They’re things we want to believe are true, and so we let ourselves go along with them because the truth is nasty and unpleasant and the lie is warm and comfortable. There has always been an audience for these lies, and there always will be. The three lies are:

1. It’s somebody else’s fault.

2. There are easy answers.

3. You shouldn’t have to pay for it.

#1 is the most popular, and usually the ugliest. Whether it’s communists, Jews, Muslim terrorists, Hutus, or any group you care to name, there’s always a popular trade to be made in scapegoating an “enemy” as the source of all your problems. Once that enemy is defeated (and “defeated” can be a vague term covering a wide variety of nasty options) your problems are over. If they’re not, of course, you can always find another enemy.

But it isn’t always about wiping out the “enemy” group; sometimes it’s more profitable to keep them around as perpetual scapegoats. Race has been used for this purpose a lot in America; back in the early days of unionization, when business owners wanted to prevent the working class from organizing, they’d usually play one ethnic group against another in an effort to keep them from realizing they’d get further together than separately. “We’d love to pay you more, but those (Negroes/Irish/Chinese/Italians/insert group here) work for cheap, you know…” It can be handy to have someone to blame for everything.

#1 and #2 go hand in hand a lot, especially when passions have gotten high enough that scapegoating has moved to brutality, but it’s more often seen by itself. Anyone who has a pet cause will trot out #2 at some point to support it, usually as a way of solving a complex or intractable problem. “All we need to do is reduce the capital gains tax, and the economy will improve!” “All we need to do is get rid of pornography, and violence against women will stop!” “All we need to do is drill in Alaska, and we’ll find all the oil we’ll ever need!” This one works especially well because the lie is always short, simple, and direct; while the truth that contradicts it is usually long, complicated, and involves fiddly technical bits that it’s easy to pick holes in. (Sometimes, of course, the lie is as simple as, “Problem? What problem?” This works very well with situations that gradually deteriorate, instead of being big, obvious crises.)

And of course, #2 combined with #3 is a perennial favorite of the entrenched interests that feel that (in the words of Despair.com) “if you’re not part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.” Most problems, especially the endemic or systematic ones, need a lot of hard work and sacrifice to fix. And when one guy is telling you, “Hey, we can fix this, but it’ll take a lot of hard work and effort and sacrifice and time,” and the other guy is saying, “Nah, we just need to build a big wall along the Mexican border,” which one are you going to try first?

Of course, it’s not just politicians that make use of these lies. Generals do it too; after all, Clausewitz said that war was just a continuation of politics by other means. In World War II, as they were discussing the best way to fight the Japanese offensive in China, General Claire Chennault suggested that the new science of air power could be used to fight the war with minimal casualties, bombing the Japanese from forward air bases and bringing them to their knees with very little manpower or supplies. General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who was commanding the US ground forces at the time, said that Chennault’s strategy was foolish–the Japanese would just overrun the air bases and take the territory. Only a hard-fought ground campaign, one with a major commitment of men and material, would take back China.

Unsurprisingly, everyone went with Chennault’s plan. Unsurprisingly, the Japanese overran the forward air bases and took the territory. Because in war, unlike politics, lies get exposed quickly.

Torontoist asked me to weigh in on whether Toronto should be its own province, so I did that very thing.

You know, it’s nice to know that Marc Thiessen is exactly the whiny, disingenuous little toad in desperate need of a cockpunching that I imagined him to be.

So a few people emailed me asking me to say something about Warner Todd Huston’s screed about the issue of Captain America where the tea partiers are shown in a less than sympathetic light. Individuals unfamiliar with Warner Todd Huston may need to know that this instance probably represents the apex of his influence as a professional complainant, as Warner Todd has previously complained about all sorts of other things and nobody has ever taken him seriously. However, Marvel Comics is now owned by Disney, which means that Joe Quesada – never exactly one to court the dislike of anybody other than the dedicated fanboys who will buy comics regardless of how many times he makes Spider-Man sell his soul to save an old lady – apologized immediately, because maybe Disney would fire him or something.

(I jest, of course. Let’s be honest: it makes sense for Marvel to apologize because it’s not worth the hassle of Sean Hannity crusading against them. It likewise makes sense for Ed Brubaker to apologize, because regardless of his personal beliefs he’s got a family to feed and there are more important things to go to bat over than a page out of a licensed character comic book that got some cretins’ undies up in a twist.)

This is a multipart saga, so let us begin.

1.) Warner Todd Huston Is Angry About Captain America #602

Warner Todd was very angry about this issue, and the reason he is angry is this:

In it the current Captain (there have been a few of them, apparently) is on the trail of a faux Captain America that is mentally deranged and getting chummy with some white supremacist, anti-government, survivalists types going by the name of “the Watchdogs.”

That “white supremacist” thing is a sticking point for Warner Todd, and it’s part of the reason he’s an idiot. Here are all the quotes from Captain America #602 wherein the Watchdogs are referred to as white supremacists:

(sound of tumbleweed drifting through empty town)

…oh wait, there aren’t any. Now, granted, the Watchdogs were introduced in 1987, a year after Warner “I Know All About Comics, Dammit” Todd says he quit reading them, so maybe he’s not aware that the Watchdogs, while always overtly right-wing and “traditional values”-y, were never actually portrayed as racists. (Mark Gruenwald, as I recall, wasn’t comfortable portraying them as such.) Similarly, in this issue, there is not one mention of the Watchdogs’ attitudes towards race.

Werner Todd is inferring motivation, plain and simple. He sees a mythical organization of baddies modeled after right-wing extremist militias and assumes they must be racist. There is literally not one thing in the entire comic where you can assume anything about the Watchdogs’ or protestors’ racial beliefs based on their actions. You have to want to see it.¹

But there is more:

The Captain tells him, “no it’s perfect… this all fits right into my plan.” After this we find that the Captain’s plan is to send the black man into a redneck bar to pretend to be a black man working for the IRS and to get everyone all mad… because… well, you know that every white person is a racist that hates black civil servants, right?

It feels a bit oversimplistic to point out that Bucky’s plan is actually to draw the attention of traveling Watchdog recruiters by pretending to beat up a civil servant and be all “I hate the gubmint” while they’re watching – because the Watchdogs hate the federal government, you see – but amazingly, Warner Todd was unable to figure out this actually pretty simple bit of plot. Now, granted, Ed Brubaker didn’t write in some expository thought balloons saying things like “Must make this look good… so the Watchdogs notice me and ask me to join them!” but then again I guess he made the mistake of writing above a sixth-grade reading level.

So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just “hate the government,” they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government.

My word, why would anybody ever associate tea partiers with racism? Why would anybody dare suggest that extremists might try to infiltrate the tea party movement for the purposes of recruitment? (I’m not even gonna bother collecting hyperlinks about tea partiers being “angry” or mostly white, because seriously now, come on.)

2.) Carla Hoffman Decides To Be Reasonable With A Jackass

In response to Marvel’s nigh-immediate capitulation to Warner Todd’s offense that a portrayal of a tea party rally would even dare hint at tea partiers being slightly racist rather than upstanding moral whatevers, Carla Hoffman wrote a response, to which Warner Todd immediately wrote both a patronizing comment wherein he was offended that Carla hadn’t heard of him and he did too know about these here comical books, and then, not satisfied with that, an additional blog entry, because he decided that Carla was a stupidhead.

This is mostly Carla’s fault for treating Warner Todd as someone interested in discourse. She made this mistake because Carla, at root, is a nice person who wants to get along with everybody. I, however, am not a nice person and I do not give a tinker’s cuss if I get along with Warner Todd or not. The man is a pustule on public discourse and should be treated as such.²

3.) Warner Todd Escalates

Anyway. After Warner Todd complains about how liberals are stupid and self-righteous and don’t understand complex concepts – and how come they don’t just talk politely to old Warner Todd anyhow? – for a few paragraphs, he gets into the meat of his diatribe.

I should start this discussion by saying that there isn’t anything wrong with enjoying comic books, even as an adult. They can be fun, for sure. But to imagine that comic books offer anything other than lowgrade entertainment is laughable. Comics are not high art (in fact, most of them are horrible even as graphic art) and they most certainly do not equal anything of the sort of deep, consequential literature. Comics are a childish, formulaic, lowest common denominator form of entertainment. It doesn’t make them evil or useless or bad necessarily. It just makes them low-end, fun. They are nothing to be taken seriously. If you are someone that lives for your next comic, or you want to claim that comic books are “art” worthy of serious consideration… you need to get out of your parent’s basement a little more often.

First off, the incidence of a “parents’ basement” joke (with improper use of an apostrophe, way to go you professional writer you!) should be the first and most obvious sign that Warner Todd is a hack of the first degree and that this moment of accidental relevance is indeed the pinnacle of his professional life, and that should make you feel sad if you are a good person. I am not an especially good person, so it makes me feel dark and demonic glee.

Secondly, the fact that Warner Todd declaims comics as “horrible even as graphic art” just goes to show you that he’s an ignoramus who doesn’t know anything about the form generally. But maybe you want specific proof that he’s an idiot in this regard? Here you go:

Let’s start with the visual. Graphically, it isn’t very well drafted. It does have the benefit of being created in the semi-realist style that began to be popular in the 1980s, though, which instantly makes it better than today’s comics drawn in that horrible Japanese Anime/Manga style that has so pervaded the comic book industry of late.

Overcapitalized and barely coherent attack on manga aside, this is excerpted from Warner Todd’s very very long and very very stupid review of Watchmen. Yes, folks. You got that right. Warner Todd thinks that Dave Gibbons’ art on Watchmen “isn’t very well drafted.”

This is the point where you have to just kind of stare. It’s like somebody professing to know a lot about literature and saying something like “Dostoyevsky, he wasn’t really much of a writer” or how they’re very knowledgeable about classical music and saying “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Nothing really special about it.” It’s not that they’re advancing a contrarian opinion, because there are a number of very reasonable critiques one can make of Watchmen – it relies too heavily on a knowledge of the form and is self-referential, Alan Moore is sometimes too self-indulgent in his asides, the pirate story as allegory is forced – but saying that Dave Gibbons’ art and layouts are bad is just so fucking ignorant of the form itself that you have to immediately disqualify the speaker as knowing a damn thing about comics generally, no matter how many comics he collected back before 1986 when he quit collecting.³

(ASIDE: Other things Warner Todd does not like about Watchmen include: Nite Owl not being able to get it up initially for Silk Spectre, Ozymandias winning, the comic’s underlying belief that in order to be a superhero there has to be something more or less wrong with you, and the two Bernies being “unlikeable characters” because they’re Americans being written by an Englishman. No, really. He says all of this. Really, if you want to see the most trite, lazy comics “analysis” I’ve read in quite some time, do yourself a favour and click the link. We could totally have a contest! “Stupidest Thing Warner Todd Huston Says About Watchmen.“)

Anyway. Enough about Warner Todd and Watchmen, the point of which is merely to illustrate the depths of his know-nothingness. Let us continue. After Warner Todd complains at length about Carla saying “welcome to comics” and how he had tons and tons of comics back in the day (which was twenty-five years ago)

The “letter” was written by one Carla Hoffman and is replete with uninformed assumptions, hackneyed pop psychology, all wrapped up in a total failure to observe the first tenet in journalism: contact your subject before you write anything.

I can’t think of anything I’d want to do more than contact an over-ripe douchebag like this guy!

Again, Warner Todd is taking offense that Carla didn’t bother to do her research and find out that he used to read comic books twenty-five years ago so of course he knows everything there is to know about comics. Instead, Carla merely assumed that Warner Todd’s inability to actually discuss the comic in question, combined with his show of naivete over there being multiple Captain Americas, meant that he was unfamiliar with the current state of comics and comic storytelling. I wonder why she thought such a thing!

Of course, this uninformed assumption shows her arrogance. You see, because I criticized the comic book she assumed that I couldn’t possibly have ever liked comics.

No, Warner Todd. She wrote that because she’s polite, and because your argument was whining bullshit with little to no basis in reality dependent on your projection. Carla, being nice, made the assumption that you were ignorant rather than stupid and/or intellectually dishonest.

Unintentionally funny was her prosaic proclamation that the Internet spawns “strong opinion” as if my piece was merely that, yet her’s isn’t.

DEAR “PROFESSIONAL WRITER” WARNER TODD HUSTON: Please learn how to use a fucking apostrophe.

Also, Carla’s piece might be opinion – sure it is – but “strong?” She used very mild language. She didn’t use any invective or make a single personal attack – you finding ways to be insulted by her essay doesn’t count, Warner Todd – or indeed do anything other than say “you took it one way, but isn’t it also possible to read it this way?” That’s not “strong.” That’s mild. You know how I know it’s mild? Because she didn’t start making fun of your name and calling you “Weiner Todd,” which I am certain happened to you in high school in between vigorous masturbation sessions over a copy of Vampirella, wherein you had two, count ‘em TWO, letters to the editor published.

Or, in other words: stop being a whiny-ass titty-baby, Warner Todd.

Apparently someone forgot to alert little Miss Hoffman that there haven’t been any “Pro-Bush rallies” since about 2003 when he last ran for president. Further, Miss Hoffman obviously has no clue that the Tea Party movement is just as mad at Bush as they are Clinton and Obama.

They were so mad at him that they sat on their asses for eight years until President Blacky McBlackerton got elected! That sure showed him. Of course, Carla wasn’t attempting to suggest that Tea Party rallies were explicitly pro-Bush rallies – why would anybody think that – but instead that the Tea Partiers, rather than being apolitical as per their claim, were merely an extension of Republican activism. Of course, reading that would require the ability to understand subtlety and nuance, which Weiner Todd isn’t good at except for when he’s trying to find proof that Ed Brubaker thinks tea partiers are racists.

Uh, no. Sam Wilson is not his “real name.” Sam Wilson is a character’s name. It isn’t a real person we’re talking about here. This poor young lady cannot tell reality from fiction, apparently.

Weiner Todd here feels the need to take a cheap shot at Carla, who was honestly nothing but pleasant to him. “Real name,” in this instance, of course refers to “Sam Wilson’s personal name, as opposed to calling him ‘the Falcon.’” I assume that Weiner Todd knows this, and had to sit back and have a good giggle in his study – fondly remembering his erotic adventures with Vampirella, who whispered in his ear that he was a true comics fan.

Anyway, there’s an awful lot more in this poor girl’s “open letter” that puts her in a pretty bad light for logic, intelligence, and delusion.

“…which I’m not gonna get into. No reason!”

Since right after her letter to me I replied. (You can see my reply here, too), let’s get to the unhinged, hatemongers that chose to reply to my posting after Hoffman’s.

DEAR “PROFESSIONAL WRITER” WERNER TODD HUSTON: Learn how to not splice a fucking comma.

But anyway, the rest of his article is just Weiner Todd whining endlessly about how commenters at Robot 6 weren’t nice to him after he shat copious and unearned condescension on Carla:

There were, of course, all sorts of distempered name calling and obscene language, the sort we’ve come to expect from the left. There was the ever common “asshole,” the varied spellings of “douche bag,” an occasional “jerk,” and “Nazi.” Even at least one “fucking clown” was thrown in for good measure. But remember, each and every one of these poor youngsters assumed that they were more open minded, nicer, more tolerant than that mean old Warner Todd Huston.

This is one of my least favorite tactics: the “barbarians at the gate” argument, ever beloved of conservative writers on the internet. “Oh my heavens! You have said a swear! That completely invalidates every single one of your points because you are clearly no gentleman, sir! Good day! I must exit before I come down with a case of the vapours!”

For the sake of illumination, let me present how Weiner Todd opened his essay attacking Carla:

These emails and replies to my comic book analysis really brought it home that to be a liberal you must make assumptions of your enemy so that they fit neatly into your preconceived notions of the world and you must never try to ask them any questions to determine if they really do fit into the box you’ve constructed for them. You must assume you are more grown up than those you attack. You must assume that you are more intelligent. You also must assume that people that like the same sort of things that you like must think just like you do. In other words, to be a liberal you must begin every discussion, every consideration of ideological premises, with the base assumption that all good people are just like you. Everyone else is venal, mean, stupid or low. Not just wrong, but evil.

I’m not sure what’s more impressive here: the sheer volume of projection on Weiner Todd’s part, or the fact that this is just a long series of personal attacks largely unjustified by the rest of his column where he then complains about other people’s personal attacks. For people like Warner Todd, “civility” isn’t anything to do with attitude or manners; it’s to do with specific words. It’s a set of rules – don’t say this, don’t say that, but this and the other are permissible – rather than a sense of respecting other people. When you understand that attitude, you understand a lot about Weiner Todd.⁴

1. Now, granted, the Falcon is leery of hanging out with the tea partiers in the book. But guess what: Sam Wilson is a black liberal. Do you think black liberals want to hang out with tea partiers generally? I’m sorry, but when did we get so, ahem, politically correct as to demand that tea partiers be perceived equally by citizens of all colours and creeds as upstanding and moral figures in a work of fiction, and even so by fictional figures who would reasonably be leery of them were they real people? Warner Todd, you big ol’ Tolerance Bear, you. [↩]
2. Also, he is the only guy I have ever seen who manages to look worse both with facial hair and without. If he is going to learn anything from comic books, it is the value of a mask. [↩]
3. “Hey, guys! I know a lot about music! I stopped buying albums back in 1986 but I still know lots about them! Do you guys like Duran Duran? They’re pretty awesome, right?” [↩]
4. And, one hopes, why I completely abandoned any attempt at civility after the first paragraph of this entry. [↩]

Grazzt requested

A comparison of our Reform Party and the American Tea Party movement, and anything the Americans can learn from the Canadian experience with a successful fledgling grassroots movement.

Unfortunately, due to societal differences, the answer is “probably not a lot.”

First off, a quick dime’s worth of exposition for Americans unfamiliar with the history of Canadian politics: the Reform Party was a political party that spun off from the old Progressive Conservatives¹ back in the late 80s, grew to dominate western Canada’s conservative political scene, and then rebranded itself as the Canadian Alliance party because they decided they needed a stupid name too before ultimately re-unifying with the remnants of the PCs to become the new Conservative Party of Canada, which the Reformers dominated far more greatly.

Now, with that exposition out of the way, the first distinguishing factor between the Reform Party and the tea partiers is that Reform had its genesis as an explicitly regionalistic party. Reform was created for no other reason than to address western Canadians’ conservative political concerns. Now, granted, you can argue that the tea partiers are disproportionately located in one portion of the United States (e.g. the South, and to a lesser extent the Midwest), but their concerns aren’t really regional in basis.

The second distinguishing factor is that the Reform Party had its real arrival as a national force (okay, still primarily a regionally based national force, but even so, one able to compete electorally across the country) because the Progressive Conservatives from whom they split off were the party in power. The PCs had attempted an ambitious and unpopular Constitutional reform which failed, plus instituted the GST² and led the country during a period of recession and were deeply, deeply unpopular. The new, invigorated base of the Reform Party was thus former PCs. Again, you can attempt to draw similarities by suggesting that the majority of tea partiers are somewhat disaffected Republicans, but there are less Republicans than Democrats in the USA and they’re not in power. This is why you see tea partiers more interested, in a lot of cases, in “taking back” the Republican party by supporting tea-party-friendly candidates over moderate Republicans: they’re still reacting against the party in power, but the party in power is the Democrats, to whom they’re ideologically opposed.

However, the tea partiers have the same problem that Reformers did back in the day, which is that the bulk of the political mainstream sees them as stupid hicks who are, at the very least, slightly racist. The Reform Party dealt with this by disavowing or dropping support for the occasional prominent member or candidate who fucked up and said something too obviously racist or homophobic in public, but generally didn’t bother reprimanding or commenting when one of their run-of-the-mill members did so. This is at least in part the reason why the Reform Party – and later the Canadian Alliance – never really broke through in Ontario or Quebec, which are more liberal provinces than the western half of Canada generally.³

And ultimately, it’s worth remembering that the Reform Party’s success at finally becoming mainstreamed into Canadian politics (rather than a permanent opposition party) only happened when they merged with the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives, a rebranding which made them more accessible to the Canadian general public. However, that rebranding also caused them to become slightly more moderate, or at least to accept more moderately conservative politicians into their framework. I don’t think the tea partiers are really interested in doctrinal inclusivity – mostly because a lot of them don’t have any fucking clue about policy other than they like to shout a lot – so this route to success might pose problematic for them.⁴

Finally, note that this rebranding created a balancing act which is problematic because Stephen Harper is probably the only politician in the entire party that the old-school moderate Tories and the right-wing Reformers will accept as a leader, and Harper can’t be the leader forever: as he straddles the fault line of the conservative movement in Canada he gets stretched further and further, and more and more of the old Reformers grow alienated. Eventually, they’ll demand that one of their idiot MPs take command, and that’ll work about as well as Stockwell Day’s tenure as leader did.

1. Yes, we all know it was a stupid name. Whatever. [↩]
2. New sales taxes have always been a formula for unpopularity. [↩]
3. People think British Columbia is some sort of massive hippie commune because of the existence of Vancouver, but outside of Vancouver there are people so conservative they’re still not sure about these newfangled telephones. [↩]
4. And finally, although I don’t want to get into the details, a parliamentary system such as Canada’s is a lot friendlier to the genesis of new parties than the United States’ governmental system is. [↩]