Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Tuesday, October 30, 2018

BC Referendum on Proportional Representation: Look to Newton


The claim that Proportional Representation (PR) is the “suffrage question of the 21st century” seems to assume that all PR systems are worthy public policy and that one should vote for PR regardless of any possible flaws in the package as presented by the BC NDP.[1]   As former BC NDP Leader and Federal Liberal Health Minister Ujjal Dosanjh pointed out on the CBC Vancouver’s The Early Edition the other day there is no minimum threshold required for the current referendum to pass.  In previous referenda it was held at 60 percent, an onerous but responsible level. But now we could change the constitution, as Dosanjh put it, with 19 percent of the vote.

PR is also thought of as a kind of guarantee that your vote will be represented in the legislature – but by unelected representatives, at least in part, which in turn defeats the purpose of having a vote, as there is no direct check on these members, save for party hierarchy.  A number of Canadians complain that our members of the Senate are appointed.  Now the appointees could come to the Legislative Assembly.
 
Permit me a return to the origins of liberal democracy in England, to the time of the Glorious Revolution, when both John Locke - a pivotal political philosopher and author of Two Treatises of Government - and Sir Isaac Newton flourished in the late seventeenth century.  It’s no accident that Newton’s Third Law of Motion made it into Locke’s liberal political thinking: “For each and every action is an equal and opposite reaction”.  And it’s no accident that the two nations Locke’s thought influenced most – revolutionary England and revolutionary USA – are still most resistant to PR. 

The object of political liberalism is to prevent abuses of power by means of opposing parties, binary or otherwise, which compete for legislative power, not as enemies, but in regular electoral exercises of popular opinion which functions as a check on authority.  First-past-the-post (FPTP) makes the case that each party – not the voter - should be given a chance to govern in the legislature, assuming they have popular momentum behind them. As Ujjal Dosanjh points out, PR coming only one year after the BC NDP mandate might be a bit premature: leader John Horgan could sweep the next election.

Finally, the idea that PR is the “suffrage question of the 21st century” is naïve.  Yes, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees adults the right to vote, but it’s no reason to make the vote proportional in the legislature.  PR is not a right. Some Canadians may be obsessed with Michael Ignatieff’s dated “Rights Revolution”, but as I look around the world today I see the diminishment of liberal democracy and the rise of demagoguery – and countries with PR are far from immune.  PR is no panacea.  I would rather protect my democracy with Newton’s Third Law, which I understand, than with the BC NDP’s blank slate PR which only offers public convolution.







[1] See “Referendum: PR vs. FPTP at DC talk” Front page. Tri-City News, Fri. Oct. 26, 2018

Monday, October 29, 2018

The Tree of Life Massacre

The shooting of 11 Jews who had come to pray in their Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday October 27, 2018 is just about two weeks short of the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom, which occurred throughout Germany on November 9-10, 1938.

Saturday, October 13, 2018

The People vs. Democracy: A Comment.


Yascha Mounk, lecturer at Harvard University, has written and interesting book: The People vs. Democracy.  He argues that liberal democracy as we know it – the world over – is cleaving into illiberal democracies run by populists and undemocratic liberalism as represented by ‘elites’ in the EU, for example.  On the whole Mounk does a more effective job with the former as opposed to the latter, which he sometimes has difficulty pinning down, partly because the term liberalism can mean a great deal of different things to many people.[1]

Closely analyzed is the rise of social media, the problem of economic stagnation, and questions of identity in the face of increased levels of immigration, all of which contribute to the populist phenomena.  Along the way Mounk acknowledges a number of historical gems: not only were women and slaves discounted as citizens of Athens but immigrants and their children were as well.  This meant that even individuals such as Aristotle were prevented from full participation in city-state affairs.[2]  In other words, democracy – despite its decomposition into the demos (people) and kratia (rule) - for most of its history has been rather limited.
 
He also points out that democracy flourished in Europe only after it was ethnically cleansed by World War II.  Today’s loss of homogeneity means that older citizens – pensioners, for example, who voted for Britain’s Brexit - are indeed confronting (and retreating from) much more equal and diverse politics.  But Mounk also warns that millennials (those born after 1980) tend to increasingly express appreciation for strongman politics, for example in the USA, but this trend can also be found in Germany, France and Britain.[3]

The People vs. Democracy is an important book because it approaches populist demagoguery as a global problem – not merely a Trump phenomenon, and it is bold enough offer insightful solutions.  One annoying feature of the text is that the language is very plain – almost as if one were reading from a college textbook.  Perhaps the rise of social media means that even works from Harvard need to be boiled down to their simpler elements.  The chapter on “Renewing Civic Faith” is particularly rewarding, and I encourage all to read it, while supplementing it with some of your own rhetorical flourishes.



[1] See, for example, Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2018), p. 243.
[2] Ibid., p. 162.
[3] Ibid., pp. 109-111.