Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Post-Mortem

A good night for the NDP.

A very BAD night for Canada.

It is the government we deserve.

We deserve it for tolerating our first-past-the-post electoral system which has allowed a deluded and ignorant 40% of the population to give stephen harper dictatorial powers over the rest of us, ... the MAJORITY of us.

We deserve it for having two main English Canadian opposition parties who could not work together to defeat a man they both acknowledge has contempt for parliamentary democracy.

I shudder to think of the level of petulant, self-righteous whining that some of the Liberal bloggers on "Progressive Bloggers." ("There is a red door and a blue door" indeed!) Look people; BOTH parties were equally self-interested. They wanted the sun and the moon. Now they can have their starless sky.

What though, does it matter if we have the NDP as the official opposition in a harpercon majority? Look at how he treated Parliament when he had a minority! We're in for a terrible five years of brutality, of arrogance, of misery, or rising poverty, of ecological destruction.

What can we say going forward? First of all ...

THE LIBERAL PARTY OF CANADA MUST DIE!

Seriously. The era of easy answers is over. I said earlier that if we held harper to a minority, the an NDP-Liberal coalition should have used its power to indict him for war crimes charges, exposed his authoritarianism, enacted legislative protections to prevent any prime minister from doing what he did in the future, and educated the populace on the fragility of their democracy. We should have destroyed harper and allowed the Liberal Party to take its place as the right-wing party in Canada.

That did not happen. harper has a majority.

The only thing now is for the Liberal Party of Canada to die. If you want corporate free trade deals and imperialist wars, vote Conservative. If you want public health care, public broadcasting, Parliamentary oversight, civil and social rights for everyone, vote NDP.

The Liberal Party of Canada is an anachronism. It is now the spoiler party. If "progressives" delude themselves into believing that the NDP are socialist extremists, and that the party of NAFTA and the invasion of Afghanistan and the rape of Haiti is a progressive party, and they again take their rump of a party out in 2016, all they're going to do is split the vote again.

Let's make it clear: There is now only one party for progressives to rally around. Let's make it a clear choice. NDP or Conservative. Our first-past-the-post electoral system has just shown its horrible inefficiency last night. Nothing is going to change that.

It is over.

Only narrow, selfish, deluded partisanship can make someone believe that the Liberal Party of Canada still has a role to play in the 21st Century. BOTH parties are guilty of partisan blindness. OKAY? But the NDP has emerged from this contest on top. The Liberals have lost Quebec. They long ago lost the West. They are the second-choice of Ontario voters.

Let it be the Conservatives vs. the NDP.

We are in for a terrible five years. harper and his nest of morons and vermin are going to believe that their stupid bullshit has been vindicated. It has not been. The quality of Canada's political culture has been tried and tested and found wanting.

Conservative policies do not work. But harper and flaherty are obviously going to jump to the conclusion that tax-cuts for the wealthy and massive cuts to the welfare state and deregulation of finance are winning policies. They're going to jump on to the band-wagon of ridiculous austerity and destructive tax-cuts that the Democrat-Republican coalition is pursuing south of the border. US austerity, the interest rate rises of the European Central Bank, the stagnation in Japan, ... they're all going to produce another economic crises. It is going to be "Great Recession Part II." And the moronic harpercons are not up to the job. They are going to be exposed for the evil fools that they are.

But we are all going to suffer for it.

Those people who united to try to defeat harper must now abandon the partisan divides and ask themselves how dangerous do they find harper? And we have to pursue other avenues of resistance. Real resistance. Not the sort of left-wing protester "resistance" which involves sitting on a sidewalk allowing some riot-police to smash your bones, but real, effective resistance.

We have to expose the failure of neoliberalism and work to show at least 55% of the voters that harper's policies are diseased fantasies.

We have to come up with a genuine challenge to corporate power.

It is going to be a terrible five years.

17 comments:

lipoduck said...

Well said. I sincerely hope Layton's tweet about rolling up his sleeves and getting to work has substance, because we're going to need it. As a Torontonian, I blame the GTA for letting Harper scare them into not voting for the Liberals and their "reckless coalition" and believing the BS about the Cons maintaining economic stability. If those ridings had stayed red, Stevie wouldn't have got his majority. Oh well, I guess those voters will learn later rather than sooner. Chalk it up to growing pains.

thwap said...

lipoduck,

I should add that there are good Liberals who have decent reasons to oppose the NDP.

Which is what makes this triumph of stupidity, coming as it does as a result of partisan progressive vote-splitting, all the more infuriating.

no_blah_blah_blah said...

There are certainly no easy answers. This time, 40% of the voters chose the Conservatives, which is a larger vote share than the last election (36% for the Conservatives in 2008, if I recall correctly).

To be fair, if protests were very large (like hundreds of thousands of people) and filled with very angry people... they would be noticed. The likelihood of enough Canadians becoming angry enough to do this? Given last night's result, I would say highly unlikely.

The main reason why typical protests don't work? They're symbolic... usually gatherings of small numbers of people with little power/influence in addition to well-wishers for a few hours. They're easy targets, if the government chooses to see them that way (e.g. G20 in Toronto).

Convince workers that they're being given a raw deal, and corporations will suffer from work stoppage. The government will have to at least take notice once the corporations come running for help. The Western world runs on money, and unions remain the best way for otherwise powerless people to stand up for themselves.

The ultimate thing to remember, though, is that it is 40% of the voting public who decided that five more years of Conservative government (now a majority) is a good thing. As someone else put it far more eloquently than I ever could, Harper is a symptom, not the disease.

Orwell's Bastard said...

There's a passage from Hunter S. Thompson that I tweeted about last night, so no point in reproducing it yet again here.

But bad as it was to see Harper get his majority, it was even worse to watch the New Democrats jumping up and down and celebrating. So you won more than a hundred seats. So you're the official opposition now. Whoop-de-do. The bad guys have their majority now. Harper can do whatever the fuck he wants, and there's not a goddamn thing we can do about it. The opposition benches might as well be filled with monkeys, or not even filled at all.

thwap said...

No blah and OB,

OB's point about the uselessness of the opposition is entirely true. The NDP can make some noise, but that's about it.

What they have to do is use their status for its publicity and I think that we leftists are going to have to get in their face to make sure that the message they convey during harper's tyranny is as leftist (and therefore sane) one as is possible for Canada.

The system that 40% voted for does not work. That's going to become ever more obvious in the terrible years ahead.

And yes, No blah, ... we need to act at the level of the economy, ... we have to resist them so that it hurts them, not us.

Anonymous said...

Sure the NDP can use their status for publicity and get a little bit of free coverage in the media. But that's nothing compared to the ad buys that the Conservative party will make. According to the Globe & Mail, in Toronto the six weeks before Feb. 21, the Conservative ads had over 10 times the frequency and reach of Liberal and NDP ads combined.

With media time like that, the next recession will be commonly known as "not Harper's fault" and "far far worse if we had the evul socialists". That the other countries that follow a plan of slashed corporate taxes, austerity, and mega prisons end up in dire economic straights too? That just means it was a "global" recession. Nothing to do with government policies. Oh, and ignore economic data from countries that did things differently, like Australia, or countries that lead the way with corporate tax cuts, like Ireland. :(

lance said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
lance said...

"It is going to be a terrible five years."

I truly hope you enjoy them.

thwap said...

Anonymous,

Everything you wrote makes sense. But there's a movement that's been started and which will expand inevitably, given the consequences of a global economic implosion.

lance,

I have no idea what you mean. you might be saying that harper will actually be awesome and that I'll be pleasantly surprised, OR you're saying that you hope I suffer (whether as a result of real ill-effects from harper's policies or because I'll just be irritated with his stupid policies).

Uncommoner said...

It WAS a terrible five years. The next five are likely to be catastrophic.

IF Layton and the NDP can show themselves to be an effective opposition party, maybe there's some hope.

But with what I see on the horizon, I'm thinking that Harper whips his caucus far too efficiently to let anyone interfere with his plans.

wondering said...

Sorry thwap, can't agree with you on your conclusion that the Liberal party must die. They occupy an important place on the spectrum: center. They need to be there to represent those interests for two reasons:
1. Keep the right wing from pulling all the center vote
2. Keep the left wing left. Otherwise the NDP will move to occupy the center and there will be no progressive conscience in Canada.

Do I want more Canadians to vote left? Of course! I'd love to an NDP majority government for Canada. But ending the Liberal party is not in the best interests of Canadians. It's the fucking Conservatives that need to be chased into the hinterlands.

thwap said...

wondering,

That was what I'd hoped for. That the harpercons would be destroyed.

But what is "the centre"? I think it's based on the delusion that you can increase social inequality, de-fund public programs, invade poor countries and still pretend that you're a "progressive who ensures that nobody gets left behind."

If the Liberals want to survive as a party, then they should work with other progressives, to form a coalition that will implement proportional representation no ifs, ands, or buts.

Then we won't have to deal with this bullshit anymore.

Sir Francis said...

These will be our George W. Bush years—years of staggering stupidity and unrepentant incompetence. And after it ends, we'll look back and be unable to believe that it actually fucking occurred.

The right-wing sacks of shit we've just elected are precisely the fucktards who've been wrong about everything...everything...over the last decade. And the Canadian people have rewarded not just that relatively remote and abstract evidence of their cretinism but also the fresher and more immediate idiocies and corruption of the last five years of the dismal Harper era.

I naturally expected the Prairies to keep their lips locked onto the CPC’s anus, but the self-abasement of the GTA was deeply disappointing. The 905 needs to be wiped out by a new Black Plague. It needs to happen now. Not tomorrow. Right now.

thwap said...

Sir Francis,

You're right. It's the bush II years for Canada now. Except in our case, we had the benefit of knowing what that would mean. We also had more than enough evidence that harper is capable of descending to those depths from his abominable behaviour with his minority. And we did it anyway.

We have failed as a country.

And both the Liberals and the NDP campaigned against each other.

Where was the focus on democracy? Ignatieff said some things about it during the English debate. Not very eloquently, but at least he said something. (Then again, he helped bush II on the course towards an illegal war.)

I feel that this country has taken 5 years of my life from me.

Scotian said...

But smiling Jack is happy with his shiny toy because he got what he wanted. Thwap, you can say both sides are at fault for campaigning against each other (and even be right) but where you fail is comparing by how much did each side go after the other in the campaign, and on that basis the NDP were FAR more engaged in attacking the Libs especially from the leader and ad buys nationally than the reverse, and far less focused on showing Harper for what he was and why he should never be allowed back into government.

The reason I was so focused on the actions of the NDP over the past five years was because it was what they did that was going to have the most impact in whether Harper got here or not. The Libs were a tired out party with leadership issues to deal with, so it was not like they could suddenly turn it around without a few years out of power once they finally lost. My problem with the Layton approach was not that it failed to prop up the Libs but that it allowed Harper to redefine himself as a centrist style conservative not outside the mainstream! I mean you know what he is, I know what he is, but that middle of the road centrist swing voter whose numbers almost always decide the elections? s/he did NOT know what he was in no small part because the self described defenders of progressive principles and democracy did act like he was outside the norm, instead Lib Tory same old story was supposedly true!

This was ALWAYS my point Thwap, and quite honestly the fact that more voters went to the CPC to stop the NDP outside of Quebec underscores that openly ideological parties still aren't what most voters want, and for that reason the NDP either becomes the new centrist party like the old Libs or they never gain government, the only reason Harper did it was because he filed away at his image as a hard line ideologue and he was aided both by Layton and a media that clearly has not held Harper to the same sharp scrutiny as they have prior PMs and governments.

The country lost big time thanks in no small part to Layton's decision to place his and his party's electoral interests ahead of the nations AND his own party's long standing progressive and democratic principles, exactly as I feared would happen. As to your argument about the Libs must die, how much is your own partisan showing there hmmmm? Whether you like it or not the left in this country while a 20%/30% (same with CPC about 30% the remaining 40% being that middle) or so minority voice is not the actual majority of the population, the single largest group is actually the broad center, which was why the Libs and the PCPC traded government for so long with the NDP being the third party outsiders, this last election was not a sudden shift in political leanings, it was the center seeing no one speaking for them deciding on the least evil of the options as they saw it, both in the votes the NDP picked up from the Libs as well as the ones the CPC picked up from the Libs.

I've always hated extremists/fanatics/partisans because they can never see beyond their narrow perspectives let alone believe those wider perspectives have any merit. I would add this is an across the board hatred, not just in politics but in all things, for me the one thing I am an absolutist about is that there are no absolutes where human beings are concerned.

I won't darken your door any longer, I know what you believe me to be despite everything, and I doubt we are ever going to agree on what really happened and what really is true of the Canadian political context.

Nomennovum said...

Some lecturer is beening particularly incoherent today. Go to bed, satisfied that you are just so much smarter than all of the cretins that voted the wrong way.

thwap said...

Scotian,

You should know that I've stopped reading your monologues. I answered you once before in a separate post. You chose not to engage with me but to sneeringly scorn my efforts in the comments of somebody else's blog.

Nomenvoufm,

I don't respond to empty-headed comments like that one.