Political vehicle handling poorly

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/09/2023 (975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IT’S election season, and doubtlessly a significant swath of Manitobans find themselves unsatisfied with every option available to them.

The pollsters are out in force and I’ve answered a few such surveys myself. Yet I notice, as is often the case, there’s never much data reported on what percentage of people would like to vote for someone, but find themselves disenchanted with the entire political landscape.

Even beyond those who simply don’t vote, how many people do you know who hold their nose while casting their ballot for the sole reason of keeping someone they view as marginally worse from gaining office?

This discontent is a byproduct of an overarching power structure that only allows people into political office if they are committed to upholding a certain set of institutional commitments.

We are fed the illusion that any John Doe can walk in off the street and drum up grassroots support and compete in an election.

But the truth is not so simple. After all, most of us need to work a job to survive and those jobs take up a large portion of our time and energy.

Do we really expect people to make a hobby out of starting a revolutionary movement on top of that, in which one pits themselves against the staggeringly powerful, well-funded and all-encompassing political and media sectors?

Especially when those sectors typically treat such upstart idealists with either ruthless contempt, patronizing indulgence or, most often, smothering indifference.

In regards to how impossible it is to break through, the proof is in the pudding. So many people are unsatisfied with the status quo, yet virtually no grassroots outsiders break meaningfully into the political sphere. Our politics are not designed to change things.

Difficult as it is to for a revolutionary breakthrough, the landscape we have groomed makes it so that a dangerous type of outsider is the most likely to do so. In a system committed to preserving a stagnant status quo and institutional power further fortifying itself, we find ourselves in a fertile breeding ground for a specific sort of outsider to spring forth.

We saw it with the belligerent grievance politics of Donald Trump, who showed us what can happen when a population has little hope of upward mobility, mere lip service paid to the plights they face and a festering rage which need only be directed.

Shackled as we have allowed it to become, liberal democracy is a poor bulwark against fascism. We celebrate our rights to free debate and protest, but without an effective political class to enact meaningful change, protest and debate become little more than pacifying endeavours where a frustrated populace is allowed to blow off steam and pat themselves on the back for at least doing something.

But when the people who hold political influence continue to wield it in service of an ever-more top-heavy economic caste, these salves become less effective. In a system where our only recourse is once every four years choosing which brand of neoliberalism we want to toil under, people realize that they have been mostly removed from the political process and reduced to passive consumers.

Soon people start to see civil arguments and polite disagreement as political theatre and a road to nowhere.

So when times gets hard and the opiate of consumerism is either unavailable or doesn’t hit as hard anymore, we are left in a state of withdrawal — angry, belligerent and looking for someone to direct our discontent at. And fascism provides not only easy targets for who to blame, but also an easy solution for how to make things better for oneself personally.

With allusions to a grand past that never existed, when salt of the Earth people like themselves were exalted and respected, fascism allows them to indulge in the fantasy all they have to do to achieve something like making America great again is reassert themselves as the central figures that the gears of society ought to turn in service of.

And this is why the politics of grievance are so dangerous, even when it’s somebody like Heather Stefanson cravenly trying to drum up a controversy around trans schoolchildren for political points.

It may just be a quick way to make a convenient wedge issue for her, but it is feeding a beast that grows bigger and more restless all the time, and that the political class would be folly to believe they can keep tame.

While we might ask our supposedly good politicians to be better and our bad ones to stop getting worse, perhaps we might better question if the political vehicle we are driving is even capable of turning in that direction.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.