Some advice for Frank Stronach

As auto-parts magnate Frank Stronach sues his daughter Belinda Stronach for $520 million CDN to regain control of the family-operated Magna International Inc.[1], an idea comes to mind that the 86-year-old might better spend his time reading Shakespeare’s King Lear.  As the Fool puts it to the King of his conflict with his daughters:

For you know, nuncle,
The hedge sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it’s had it head bit off by it young.
So out went the candle, and we were left darkling.[2]

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[1] “Stronach sues daughter for control of family firm,” The Globe and Mail (Thursday Oct. 11, 2018), Front Page.

[2] William Shakespeare, King Lear. A Conflated Text. ed., Stephen Orgel (New York, NY: Penguin, 1999), p. 30.

“The Revolt of the Elites” in British Columbia

The fact that another School District 43 trip to China is planned for 2019 can be explained by Christopher Lash’s best-selling book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, a work which anticipated the rise of populism in America over 20 years ago.[1]  The “elites” in the Tri-Cities[2] are the professional managers at SD43 whose loyalties are international rather than local, and where the language of money speaks more loudly than our democracy, to whom our school trustees are beholden.

So trips to China “strengthen the district’s international education program”[3] and allegedly create “world citizens” – but of whom – our Chinese guests who pay fees of $15,000 per year, or the Canadian students who learn that money talks in our public school system?

And the more SD43 deepens its ties with China the more it compromises Canadian multiculturalism: just look to the network of forced indoctrination behind razor wire of Uyghurs and other Muslims in China’s western Xinjiang region.[4]  Estimates are that about one million Uyghurs are being re-purposed as model Communist citizens, which some call cultural genocide, and that’s about the Muslim population in Canada.

So if SD43 again goes free to China, what does that say to our Tri-City’s Muslim population?

The elites at SD43 can offer all the buzzwords it wants to explain why $62,725 for a 6-trustee trip to China was reimbursed by Hanban, the cultural arm of the Chinese government, but clearly it has abandoned (as Lash would put it) the ‘obligations of citizenship’, both local and Canadian.

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[1] See especially Ch. 2 “The Revolt of the Elites” in Christopher Lash, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), pp. 25-49.

[2] The Tri-Cities are Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada.

[3] See “More Cash for SD43 trustees” Tri-City News (Friday, Nov. 23, 2018), p. A3.

[4] See “Inside China’s campaign against the Urghurs,” The Globe and Mail (Monday Nov. 5 2018), Front Page.

BC Referendum on Proportional Representation: Look to Newton

The claim that Proportional Representation (PR) is the “suffrage question of the 21^st 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 21^st 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.

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[1] See “Referendum: PR vs. FPTP at DC talk” Front page. Tri-City News, Fri. Oct. 26, 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 80^th anniversary of Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom, which occurred throughout Germany on November 9-10, 1938.

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.

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[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.

De Tocqueville on democratic despotism

     I wish to imagine under what new features despotism might appear in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of men, all alike and equal, turned in upon themselves in a restless search for those petty, vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls.  Each of them, living apart, is almost unaware of the destiny of all the rest.  His children and personal friends are for him the whole of the human race; as for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he stands alongside them but does not see them; he touches them without feeling them; he exists only in himself and for himself; if he still retains his family circle, at any rate he may be said to have lost his country.

     Above these men stands an immense and protective power which alone is responsible for looking after their enjoyments and watching over their destiny.[1]

De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II (1840).

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[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Gerald E. Bevan (London: Penguin, 2003) p. 805. For further details see Volume II, Part 4, chapter 6: “What sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”.

Dostoyevsky and Trump

The following selection is from Part One, section 8 of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.  A careful reading of all of Part One is highly recommended, as it reveals how Dostoyevsky resists the entire Greek tradition since Plato which Nietzsche later develops.  Could Dostoyevsky’s critique of reason and his emphasis on the Will help explain Donald Trump’s populist presidency and anti-Western bias?
    

     Yes, but that’s just where the snag is for me! Gentlemen, please excuse me for carrying my philosophizing to such absurd lengths – forty years underground, after all!  Let me give my fancy free rein.  You see, gentlemen, reason is a good thing that can’t be disputed, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s intellectual abilities, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean the whole of human life including both reason and speculation.  And although in this manifestation life frequently turns out to be rubbishy, all the same it is life and not merely the extraction of a square root.  After all, I, for example, quite naturally want to live so as to fulfil my whole capacity for living, and not so as to satisfy simply and solely my intellectual capacity, which is only one-twentieth of my whole capacity for living.  What does reason know?  Reason knows only what it has succeeded in finding out (and perhaps there are some things it will never find out; there may be no consolation in this idea, but why not express it?), but man’s nature acts as one whole, with everything that is in it, conscious or unconscious, and although it is nonsensical, yet it lives. … In short, anything can be said of world history, anything conceivable even by the most disordered imagination.  There is only one thing you can’t say – that it had anything to do with reason. …

     Ah, gentlemen, what will have become of our wills when everything is graphs and arithmetic, and nothing is valid but two and two make four?  Two and two will make four without any will of mine!  Is that what one’s own will means?[1]

Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864).

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[1] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, tr. and intro. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin, 1972), pp.35-39.